This work intends to discuss the leadership phenomena under the perspective of the weberian theory of charismatic domination. We discuss leadership as a power relation in the weberian sense of authority. Power is a subject that is recurrent in Weber (WHIMSTER, 2009). Two questions inspire this article: 1. could the form how leaders and founders of Social Organizations (SO) describe their actions be characterized as a process of charismatic leadership under the perspective of power in Weber? 2. is there something in the actions of the leaders of social organizations that characterize it as a process of charismatic domination? The present study, a descriptive research, adopted a qualitative approach and was made possible through semi structured interviews applied in nine leaders and key managers of seven SO from the Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil, among the biggest of the sector. The results suggest that among all the interviewed (all with long trajectory of founders and conductors of SO) only two represent a charismatic leadership as described by Weber. Even so, they're suffering limits of the structure of the SO due to the natural interface with the organizational environment it had to transform; the SO was forced to bureaucratize to answer the demands of the fund raisers and sponsors. Others SO place the speech on a progressive scale between charisma and bureaucratization in a process already seen by Weber (2004). It was also found that the model of authority in SO obeys to a process of transition. If the OS used to be specifically charismatic today it manifests in a more bureaucratic form limited by artifices of legality. Nowadays, the OS workers are rather paid then voluntary. The social work fulfilled with goodwill and heroism, as perceived until recently, is ceding space for professionalization, including managers. However, the Weberian holiness and the heroism still resist in the XXI century and can the basis of questioning for many processes of humanization in the organizations.
Charismatic leadership; Charismatic domination; Social organization; Power; Leadership
