Charismatic rhetoric, integrative complexity and the U.S. Presidency: An analysis of the State of the Union Address (SOTU) from George Washington to Barack Obama

Paternalistic leadership as a double-edged sword: Analysis of the Sri Lankan President's response to the COVID-19 crisis

Despite the challenges facing small economies, leadership research has given scant attention to leaders' behaviour in those countries during crises. Using seemingly paradoxical domains of paternalistic leadership theory: authoritarian, benevolent and moral leader behaviour, together with concepts like populism from the political science domain, we analyse how Sri Lanka's 'strongman' President provided a façade of paternalistic leadership during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through analysis of written and verbal content (public speeches, independent reports and government media output), we show how the power exercised through authoritarian, as opposed to authoritative behaviour, together with espoused morality and benevolence, appears to have been effective in the short term in containing the pandemic. However, sustained success in dealing with the crisis is hampered by the contradictions between this paternalistic façade and the dark realities of authoritarian and populist leadership. Accordingly, we offer theoretical insights into how the darker elements of paternalistic leadership can be better understood and averted.

The Curious Case of Left-Wing Authoritarianism: When Authoritarian Persons Meet Anti-Authoritarian Norms

Left-Wing Authoritarianism (LWA) has a controversial history in psychology. Some researchers have expressed skepticism about the existence of LWA, whereas others have argued that LWA is a valid construct. In the present article, we offer a framework to reconcile these two perspectives by proposing that ideologically-based authoritarian norms are sometimes in conflict with the processes that create authoritarian individuals. In Western political contexts, authoritarian norms are more likely to occur on the conservative side of the political spectrum; but authoritarian attributes can occur in both conservatives and liberals. In our model, left-wing authoritarians thus often occupy the space where forces influencing authoritarianism are in conflict. We review existing evidence related to the model, present novel evidence related to the model, derive four hypotheses from the model, and discuss criteria for falsifying the model. We conclude by considering the model's place in current research on the complexities of ideology.

Text Preprocessing for Text Mining in Organizational Research: Review and Recommendations

Recent advances in text mining have provided new methods for capitalizing on the voluminous natural language text data created by organizations, their employees, and their customers. Although often overlooked, decisions made during text preprocessing affect whether the content and/or style of language are captured, the statistical power of subsequent analyses, and the validity of insights derived from text mining. Past methodological articles have described the general process of obtaining and analyzing text data, but recommendations for preprocessing text data were inconsistent. Furthermore, primary studies use and report different preprocessing techniques. To address this, we conduct two complementary reviews of computational linguistics and organizational text mining research to provide empirically grounded text preprocessing decision-making recommendations that account for the type of text mining conducted (i.e., open or closed vocabulary), the research question under investigation, and the data set’s characteristics (i.e., corpus size and average document length). Notably, deviations from these recommendations will be appropriate and, at times, necessary due to the unique characteristics of one’s text data. We also provide recommendations for reporting text mining to promote transparency and reproducibility.