Most of us carry in our heads a naive theory of what constitutes charismatic leadership. What is needed is a more precise and scientific understanding of the phenomenon. It was toward this end, a decade ago, that we proposed a behavioral theory of charismatic leadership (Conger and Kanungo 1987). In our theory. a leader's charismatic role, like any other type of leadership role (e.g., task, social, participative), is considered an observable behavioral process that can be described and analyzed in terms of a formal model.