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The purpose of this paper is explore the role that the implicit leadership theories held by followers and supervisors play in the performance appraisals of specific leaders, as well as in the promotion recommendations to higher levels of management that these leaders receive. In particular, the focus of this paper is on the degree of match between the general images held by supervisors and followers of how leaders are/should be (i.e. implicit leadership theories), and the concrete perceptions that these supervisors and followers have of the actual leaders in question.

Several propositions are established taking into account the moderating role of implicit leadership theories in the relationship between performance, on the one hand, and performance evaluation and promotion recommendations, on the other hand. These propositions are based on evidence of discrimination against women and ethnic minority groups when it comes to evaluations and promotion recommendations. Recommendations for organisational practice are derived from the issues discussed.

When there is a poor match between a supervisor's implicit leadership theories and his or her perception of a subordinate leader, this leader's performance appraisal and promotion chances are believed to decrease. In a similar manner, the implicit leadership theories of followers may influence their appraisal of a leader's performance.

This is the first time that implicit leadership theories are connected to leaders’ careers. This connection is made both in the context of equal opportunities for leaders and in the context of optimising decisions in organisations. The implicit leadership theories of both followers and supervisors need to be taken into account when evaluating and promoting leaders.

This study aims to investigate the psychological process of intertemporal choices between larger-later and smaller-sooner monetary options. Prior research showed consumer impatience – a tendency to prefer a smaller-sooner option over a larger-later option. This research identifies an individual difference that predicts patience and mediators that explain the underlying mechanism.

Two studies are conducted. Study 1 examines whether the implicit theory of intelligence consumers endorse (i.e. entity theory vs incremental theory) constitutes an antecedent of patience and whether their thoughts regarding anticipated purchase with the chosen monetary option (i.e. hedonic versus utilitarian purchase) mediate the relationship. Study 2 analyzes whether psychological reactance toward larger-later options is a mediator in this relationship using a perceived threat to freedom and affect as reactance indicators.

Entity-oriented consumers exhibited less patience than incremental-oriented consumers, especially when anticipating a hedonic purchase. Moreover, entity-oriented consumers perceived a threat to freedom from larger-later options more strongly – this enhanced perception influenced patience through two routes. One route is that the perceived threat to freedom leads to more consideration of a hedonic purchase rather than a utilitarian purchase, thereby decreasing patience. The other route is that the perceived threat to freedom elicits a stronger negative affect, resulting in lower patience.

Findings of this research shed light on the understanding of patience. They demonstrate that consumers’ implicit theory orientation is a crucial individual difference that can explain patience. Also, demonstrating the mediating roles of anticipated purchase using the hedonic/utilitarian classification and psychological reactance expanded literature by showing how they internally interact.

The purpose of this paper is to take a new look at an old idea: since McGregor’s work in the 1960s, it is common knowledge that managers’ implicit theories about their followers can have self-fulfilling consequences. Surprisingly, McGregor’s work has largely remained within the bounds of employee motivation and has not met with a wide response in related fields such as service management. Assuming that managers do not only hold implicit theories of their followers but also of their customers (i.e. implicit customer theories), this paper transfers McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y to the service context. It further derives a framework of possible consistencies and inconsistencies between management styles and service strategies, depending on implicit managerial theories about the average employee and customer.

This conceptual paper integrates a management classic, current empirical findings, and media reports into a new line of thought.

This paper develops and undergirds the thesis that it is conducive to the development of trustful and productive relationships both with customers and followers if managers proceed from confident assumptions about them, thereby activating virtuous circles instead of vicious cycles.

This paper links concepts from the organizational domain to the service domain. It implies a normative component in arguing for the productive potential of positive and the destructive potential of negative assumptions about both followers and customers. The value of this idea lies in the potential for positive relational dynamics and better customer and workplace relationships.

Contemporary careers research suggests that individuals are more likely to be proactive about their careers when they possess an internal, rather than an external locus of control (LOC). The purpose of this paper is to adopt the view that individuals can be both external and proactive depending on whether or not they possess an incremental implicit theory.

Self-administered surveys were completed by 127 employed individuals in Nigeria. These surveys were used to gather information on individuals’ external LOC, protean and boundaryless career orientations and implicit theory beliefs.

Results indicated partial support for positive relationships between external LOC and contemporary career orientations and that an incremental implicit theory can have a positive moderating effect on the relationship between an external LOC belief in chance and the values-driven protean career orientation.

The study was based on a cross-sectional study in one time period and all information was self-report.

The results suggest that HR managers that operate in global environments should consider the importance of individual implicit theory and on career orientations and take a broader view of the role of internal and external LOC.

The study questions whether predominant perspectives of the relationship between proactive career orientations and internal LOC applies to contexts where external LOC predominate.

This study is unique in the examination of positive relationships between implicit theory, external LOC and contemporary career orientations. Furthermore, the study examines these relationships in an unstable and unpredictable work environment context, Nigeria, where such positive relationships are highly necessary to improve the career self-management of individuals.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the structure, implicit attitude and consequences of followers' implicit followership theories in the Chinese cultural context through three studies. Study 1 explores the structure of followers' implicit followership theories. Study 2 examines the implicit attitude of followers towards followers' implicit followership theories. Study 3 verifies the impact of followers' implicit followership theories on the quality of collegial relationships.

The data for study 1 (n = 321) and study 3 (n = 243) were collected through an online self-report questionnaire, and the data for study 2 (n = 30) were collected through the go/no-go association task.

The structure of followers' implicit followership theories includes two dimensions: positive followership prototypes and negative followership prototypes. Followers' implicit attitudes were more likely to match positive followership prototypes than negative followership prototypes. Positive followership prototypes had a significantly positive impact on the quality of collegial relationships, whereas negative followership prototypes had a significantly negative impact on the quality of collegial relationships.

The psychology and behaviour of employees can be better understood by exploring followers' implicit followership theories.

Employees hold a relatively positive implicit attitude towards followers. Therefore, managers should provide positive feedback to improve employees' positive self-cognition so that employees can better serve the organization and better promote its development.

The paper is one of the few studies to explore followers' implicit followership theories in the Chinese cultural context.

This paper contributes to leadership categorization theory by advocating a new method to surface people's implicit leadership theories. The purpose of this new approach is to simultaneously capture individual difference in how they conceptualize leadership but within a common framework to allow for comparison of within- and between-person effects.

The authors conduct a narrative review of the implicit leadership theory, leadership categorization theory, cognitive mapping and verbal protocol literature with the purpose of surfacing a research method that will overcome the problems of over-simplification and over-individualization in existing methods.

The authors argue that using a combination of cognitive mapping and verbal protocols can capture the idiosyncrasies of individual lay theories of leadership while retaining the ability to compare people's responses through a common framework. The authors provide an example of how this method can be used to elicit people's perceptions of one aspect of implicit leadership theories, intelligence.

This new method will provide a methodology to test the subset propositions advocated by leadership categorization theory. These include the idea that subordinate level implicit leadership theories contain a subset of attributes found in the basic-level implicit leadership theories, that there is attribute integrity in superordinate implicit leadership theories through the levels, and the idea that people define leadership differently depending on the context they are observing.

Whereas previous approaches to surfacing people's implicit leadership theories either heavily constrain their responses with a predetermined generic suite of attributes or are totally open-ended and idiosyncratic, the authors advocate an approach that combines the best of both.

Drawing on socio-cognitively orientated leadership studies, this paper aims to contribute to our understanding of host country employees’ (HCEs) negative perceptions of successive expatriate leadership by exploring how their memories of shared past experiences affect these perceptions. Contrary to previous work which tends to focus on HCEs’ attitudes towards individual expatriates, the authors shift attention to successive executive expatriate assignments within a single subsidiary.

The paper is based on an intrinsic case study carried out in a Polish subsidiary of an American multinational pharmaceutical company which had been managed by four successive expatriate General Managers and one local executive. The authors draw on interview data with 40 HCEs. Twenty-one semi-structured interviews were conducted with staff who had been managed by at least three of the subsidiary’s expatriate leaders.

The authors demonstrate how transference triggered by past experiences with expatriate leaders as well as HCEs’ implicit leadership theories affect HCEs’ negative perceptions of expatriate leadership and lead to the emergence of expatriate leadership schema.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that explores the role of transference and implicit leadership theories in HCEs’ perceptions of successive executive expatriate assignments. By focussing on retrospective accounts of HCEs who had been managed by a series of successive expatriate leaders, our study has generated a more nuanced and contextualised understanding of the role of HCEs’ shared past experiences in shaping their perceptions of expatriate leadership. The authors propose a new concept – expatriate leadership schema – which describes HCEs’ cognitive structures, developed during past experiences with successive expatriate leaders, which specify what HCEs believe expatriate leadership to look like and what they expect from it.

This paper aims to investigate the influence of implicit self-theories and the change in CEO of a firm after product failure on consumers’ preference of the enhanced product.

Three experiments were conducted involving product failure and CEO change scenarios.

Studies demonstrate that incremental theorists prefer the enhanced product after the CEO change (vs no change), whereas entity theorists do not prefer the enhanced product after the CEO change. This effect is mediated by consumers’ perception of the likelihood of success of the firm after the CEO change. Furthermore, entity theorists prefer the enhanced product only when the CEO change is external (vs internal).

Future research could investigate if the impact of CEO change on product perception depends on the severity of the situation, and identify boundary conditions under which the CEO change is not beneficial.

The results suggest that organizations can take advantage of the leadership change by introducing new products strategically around the period of leadership change. Marketers can induce incremental mindset in their advertisement material during the period of leadership change to ensure that all consumers have a positive perception of the enhanced products.

This is the first research to investigate how consumers respond to leadership changes made by organizations. The findings show that different signals (internal vs external CEO change) can generate different reactions across different receivers (incremental vs entity theorists).

This paper aims to introduce the implicit firm theory, distinguishing between the belief that firms can (incremental firm theory) or cannot (entity firm theory) readily change in response to marketplace demands. It is proposed and shown, that firm theory beliefs influence customer-engagement attitudes and intentions.

Study 1 tests the relationship between firm theory, self-theory and knowledge-sharing attitudes. Study 2a tests differences between incremental and entity firm theorists in response to firm failure. Study 2b examines the relationship between firm theory and blame attributions on post-failure loyalty. Study 3 explores the effect of firm theory on perceptions of control and blame attributions following repeated firm failures.

Study 1 shows firm theory influences consumer knowledge-sharing attitudes beyond the effect of self-theory. Study 2a shows incremental firm theorists are more likely to remain loyal to a firm following failure and less likely to share negative word-of-mouth. Study 2b shows that blame attributions mediate the relationship between firm theory and loyalty intentions, with incremental theorists ascribing less blame. Study 3 shows incremental firm theorists significantly increase blame following multiple failures, while entity firm theorists do not.

Results are based on scenario-based surveys and experimental methods; their applicability in more complex real-world customer-firm relationships warrants additional study.

Firms should account for a customer’s firm theory in their communications, emphasizing situational factors to reduce post-failure blame among incremental firm theorists.

Establishes that consumers hold beliefs regarding the malleability of firm traits, which influence their firm engagement intentions.

Research reported in this manuscript focuses on the relationship between trait suspicion and the perception of abusive supervision. Based on previous research, the authors assume that suspicion is positively related to the perception of abusive supervision. The role implicit theories play in this relationship is examined.

Two studies are presented to examine the relationship between trait suspicion and the perception of abusive supervision as moderated by implicit leadership theories. The first study is a survey study, and the second study is an experimental vignette study.

Results of both studies indicate that suspicion is positively related to the perception of abusive supervision and that implicit leadership theories moderate the relationship between suspicion and the perception of abusive supervision.

Results are interpreted in terms of biases in leadership perception as well as the reversing-the-lens perspective.

While there is progress in taking into account follower characteristics and the resulting perceptual biases in the study of constructive leadership phenomena such as transformational leadership, less is know about the follower perception aspect of destructive leadership phenomena. With this research, the authors extend research into the influence of follower characteristics on the perception of abusive supervision and also look at boundary conditions of this relationship by including implicit leadership theories as a moderator.