Henry Ford and Charismatic Leadership

Henry Ford was born in 1863 to parents shaped by the recent immigration experience: his mother, Mary, was born in a Belgian family and raised by an Irish immigrant family, while his father, William, immigrated with his family from Ireland at the age of 21, after being evicted from their farm by their English landlord. The Protestant Fords did not settle in the eastern cities with the Catholic Irish but continued moving west, driven by the promise of land ownership in Michigan (Collier and Horowitz, 1987, pp. 16-17). In William's mind, the ability to own the land one worked was America's greatest virtue, setting it apart from Ireland (Halberstam, 1986, p. 51).

Try as he might, William could never impress this salient virtue on his oldest son, Henry. Henry detested farming, remarking that "(c)onsidering the results there is altogether too much work" (Collier and Horowitz, 1987, P. 21). He much preferred the study and repair of all things mechanical, an activity praised by his mother but scorned by his father if it did not involve farm machinery. This disagreement intensified when Mary Ford died in childbirth, an event Henry blamed on his father; their subsequent relationship alternated between conflict and truce until William's death in 1903 (Collier and Horowitz, 1987, p.22).

One morning, when Henry was 17, he set off for school with his younger brothers; rather than make the turn off for school, however, he continued walking along the

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ases to demonstrate these qualities (1990, p.12). In Ford's case this disintegration started to occur in the mid-1920's as Ford failed to accommodate changes in technology and the public's taste in cars, while cementing his power within the company by pitting executives against each other. One historian has said that Henry displayed a self-destructiveness that was never matched in any other giant American corporation; having created the company, Henry apparently felt that he also had the right to destroy it (Halberstam, 1986, p. 60). Probably the best known leadership theories concern "charismatic" leaders, first articulated by Max Weber in the 19th century. A charismatic leader is one who is followed because of peculiar powers and unique qualities, appearing most often during times of crisis and emerging from the masses or the margins of the social world (Hunt, 1984, 161). In the classic framework, an individual became a leader by first undergoing a personal crisis which rendered him helpless, then undergoing a change which rendered him powerful, and finally emerging as a leader during a time of crisis (Winer, Jobe, Ferrono; 1984; pp. 156-8). Although used in classical myths and projected onto ancient leader figures, this framew
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Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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