Preface

For three days in the spring of 2001, about 100 of the world’s leadership scholars, both junior and senior in the discipline, gathered on the campus of the State University of New York at Binghamton. The purpose of this gathering of scholars was twofold. First, it served as a festschrift to honor Bernard M. Bass for his over 50 years of contributions to leadership theory, research, and practice. Second, the conference sought to review and push to the next level the state of the art of transformational and charismatic leadership.

The festschrift began with an opening reception and dinner to honor Bernie Bass for his career of work on leadership, culminating in his over 20-year effort to understand transformational and charismatic leadership. For the next two days, speakers, presenters, and discussants not only reminisced about their interactions and work with Bernie over the years, but also offered their latest thoughts on transformational and charismatic leadership. Keynote addresses were delivered by Jeff Sonnenfeld, Don Clifton, Walt Ulmer, Jim Burns, Georgia Sorenson, and Wayne Casio, and many of the other contributors to the conference are listed in this book. Key sessions and themes of the leadership conference included: the meaning of the constructs of transformational and charismatic leadership; moral and ethical aspects of such leadership; measurement and analysis of transformational and charismatic leadership; related forms of leadership; and the future of leadership research.

This book, focusing on the past, present, and future state of transformational and charismatic leadership theory, is a result of the festschrift/conference. We would like to thank all the many people who made this event and book possible. Individuals and organizations we wish to thank include the conference sponsors: Center for Leadership Studies (Bruce Avolio & Fran Yammarino, co-directors), School of Management (Glenn Pitman, dean, and Richard Reeves-Ellington, associate dean), Broome-Tioga BOCES (Larry Kiley, superintendent), United Health Services (Pete McGinn, CEO), and Universal Instruments (Paul Slobodian, vice president). We thank all the keynote speakers, conference participants, and contributors to this book. Their ideas have inspired us and will move the field forward further and faster.

We also wish to thank members of the Binghamton administrative staff – Wendy Clark, Bernadette Cencetti, Mary Ellen Engard, Myra Demming, and Marie Iobst – for their hard work in helping to organize the conference and to produce this book. Several Binghamton doctoral students – John Garger, Paul Jacques, and Mike Eom – and faculty members – Don Spangler, Shelley Dionne, Surinder Kahai, Kim Jaussi, Rex Dumdum, Ron Kwok, and Naga Sivasubramanian – also contributed greatly to the success of the conference. We wish especially to thank Ruth Bass, whose life-long friendship and support have provided us all with more quality time with Bernie who has, no doubt, enriched all of our work on leadership. Finally, we wish to thank Jerry Hunt and all the production people at Elsevier Science who facilitated the publication of this book.

We now invite you, the readers, to sit back, relax, and enjoy Transformational and charismatic leadership: The road ahead. We believe that the more people travel this road, the wider it will become, and the more we will learn and develop what constitutes the most profound aspects of leadership and human potential.