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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between leaders’ work context and their prototypical implicit follower theories (pIFT). The authors assume a dual structure of pIFT and argue that leader preferences for certain employee traits and behaviours are influenced by their perception of the prevailing market conditions and organizational coordination mechanisms.

This study was conducted via an online-questionnaire with 182 US leaders from different industries. It surveyed leader's preferences for abstract and specific employee traits and behaviours, as well as their perceptions of the explorative and exploitative elements in their work context. To test for associations of corresponding variables representing leaders’ context and their employee prototype, data analysis was performed via multiple linear regression analysis.

The paper provides evidence for associations between leaders’ pIFT and their work context. The data suggest that leaders who perceive their organizational work environment as formalized consider Enthusiasm (p=0.003) and the pursuit of exploitative activities (p=0.023) as important employee characteristics, and those who experience the market conditions as dynamic show a preference for Good Citizenship behaviours (p=0.027) and the search for explorative activities (p=0.034). In terms of control variables the authors found that more mature leaders favour both exploration and exploitation in employees, while managers of larger teams emphasize exploitation in their pIFT.

The study was conducted with leaders in the USA; results are cross-sectional and representative for for-profit organizations. Potential limitations arise from a lack of generalizability of the results to others forms of organizations, cultures and work settings.

The paper provides the outline of an “ideal employee profile” for the leaders in the sample and describes potential implications of pIFT for organizational strategy relating to personnel-related decisions.

This study provides the first empirical link between leaders’ ideal employee image and work context, and enables a deeper understanding of the structure and content of pIFT.

Research on implicit followership theories – that is, individually held assumptions about how followers are and how they should be – is still in its infancy. The few existing approaches differ in what they define as the object of these theories. The authors consider the lack of two aspects in the existing literature: first, the authors consider it important to not only focus on effective but also on ideal followers – which allows investigating follower characteristics that go beyond just performance; and second, the authors demonstrate the importance of the study of characteristics which leaders explicitly see as undesirable for followers (i.e. counter-ideal follower prototypes). The purpose of this paper is to fill these gaps and to extend the literature by introducing the concept of implicit followership theories as assumptions of ideal followers.

The authors first present three studies conducted to develop a scale to measure ideal and counter-ideal follower prototypes, respectively. In a fourth study, the authors apply this scale and compare it to existing measures of implicit followership theories regarding their value for predicting leaders’ follower ratings.

Results show that the newly developed measure is reliable and valid, and comprises a useful tool for future research.

The scale can be used for leadership development programs.

The study is among the few that provide theory and evidence for the relevance of implicit followership theories and is the first to consider the ideal follower in this regard.

With the recent emergence of organizational and systemic restructuring in Anglo‐American societies, leadership and the search for prospective leaders has taken on new significance. Focuses on leader development and defines the nurturing of leaders as leader formation. Doubt is cast on the efficacy of currently popular leader models, such as transformational leadership, which purport to facilitate and enhance organizational learning. Instead, if leaders are to promote learning, recognition of a shift in focus in leadership studies towards constructivism and contextualism is required. Documents and illustrates these trends by a historical instance of institutionalized leader formation: the English public school tradition of gifted amateur, gentlemanly power. Draws the implications of the case for instrumental approaches to leadership, organizational learning and programmes of management development.

The personalities of leaders have been shown to impact the culture of their organizations and are also expected to have a more distal impact on the firm’s financial performance. However, the authors also expect that leader gender is an important intervening variable such that exhibiting various personality dimensions may result in unique cultural and performance-based outcomes for women and men leaders. Thus, the authors seek to examine first the impact of leader personality on organizational performance, as driven through organizational culture as a mediating mechanism. In doing so, the authors propose the expected impact of specific personality dimensions on certain types of organizational cultures, and those cultures’ subsequent impact on the organization’s performance. The authors then extend to consider the moderating effects of leader gender on the relationship between leader personality and organization. To support their propositions, the authors draw from upper echelons and implicit leadership theories. The authors encourage researchers to consider the proposition within a sample of the largest publicly traded US companies (i.e., Fortune 500) at an important era in history such that for the first time, 10% of these companies are led by women. In doing so, the authors hope to understand the leadership dynamics at the highest echelons of corporate governance and provide actionable insights for companies aiming to optimize their leadership composition and drive sustainable performance.

Abusive supervision is associated with many detrimental consequences. In this theory-review chapter, we extend the abusive supervision literature in two ways. First, we argue that more attention needs to be given to the emotion contagion processes between the leader and followers. More specifically, leaders’ negative affect can lead to followers’ experiences of negative affect, thereby influencing followers’ perception of abusive supervision. Second, we explore how employees draw upon their cognitive prototypes of an ideal leader or Implicit Leadership Theories (ILTs) to evaluate leader behaviors. In this regard, we argue that ILTs can influence the (negative) emotional contagion process between the leaders’ negative affect and followers’ perception of abusive supervision. In our proposed model, leaders’ expressions of negative affect, via emotional contagion, influence followers’ negative affect, perception of abusive supervision, and two behavioral responses: affect- and judgment-driven. The negative emotional contagion process between the leader and followers also differs depending on followers’ susceptibility to emotional contagion and their ILTs. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of our model.

Examines the manner in which followers’ cultural background affects their perception of leadership. Being common in many comparative cultural studies, the full range model was chosen as the theoretical framework for investigating the research questions. The model includes nine leadership dimensions measured by the multifactor leadership questionnaire (MLQ). The main hypothesis was that managers’ behaviors measured by the MLQ will be assessed differently by followers who represent different cultures. Compares workers from two different cultural backgrounds who referred to the same leader. The results of the research supported the hypothesis. The research supports the possibility that leadership is, a to great extent, in the eyes of the beholders. Discusses theoretical explanations deriving from social cognition models.

What factors influence teachers to attribute leadership qualities to some principals and not others? In particular, what accounts for attributions of transformational school leadership? Guided by an information processing perspective to explain teachers’ attributions, answers to these questions were explored through data provided by an achieved sample of 1,253 elementary and secondary teachers from a single large school system. Replicating the framework and design of an earlier study by the same authors, this, as well as the previous study, found that teachers’ leadership attributions were largely explained by alterable rather than unalterable variables.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how employee perceptions of change and leadership might impact work engagement following major organizational change.

Social media invited US workers recently experiencing major organizational change to anonymously complete a web-based survey requesting qualitative and quantitative responses. Values-based coding and thematic analysis were used to explore qualitative data. Hierarchical and linear regression, and bootstrapped mediation were used to analyze quantitative data.

Analysis of qualitative data identified employees’ perceptions of ideal change and ideal leadership were well supported in the change leadership literature. Analysis of quantitative data indicated that employee perceptions of leadership fully mediated the relationship between employee perceptions of change and work engagement.

Study findings imply that how employees perceive change is explained by how they perceive leadership during change, and that these perceptions impact work engagement. Although these findings appear commonsensical, the less than stellar statistics on major organizational change may encourage leaders to become more follower-focused throughout the change process.

The study makes a contribution to an understudied area of organizational research, specifically applied information processing theory. This is the first study that identifies employee perceptions of leadership as a mediator for perceptions of change and work engagement. From a value perspective, leaders as successful change agents recognize significant cost savings in dollars and human welfare by maintaining healthy workplaces with highly engaged workers.

The social relations model (SRM; Kenny, 1994) explicitly proposes that leadership simultaneously operates at three levels of analysis: group, dyad, and individual (perceiver and target). With this model, researchers can empirically determine the amount of variance at each level as well as those factors that explain variance at these different levels. This chapter shows how the SRM can be used to address many theoretically important questions in the study of leadership and can be used to advance both the theory of and research in leadership. First, based on analysis of leadership ratings from seven studies, we find that there is substantial agreement (i.e., target variance) about who in the group is the leader and little or no reciprocity in the perceptions of leadership. We then consider correlations of leadership perceptions. In one analysis, we examine the correlations between task-oriented and socioemotional leadership. In another analysis, we examine the effect of gender and gender composition on the perception of leadership. We also explore how self-ratings of leadership differ from member perceptions of leadership. Finally, we discuss how the model can be estimated using conventional software.

Drawing on the social-cognitive and motivational literature of leadership, the present study examines the influence of young adults' self-perceptions of leadership on their leadership self-efficacy (LSE) and motivation to lead (MTL) in their future career. The authors further examine gender and socio-economic status (SES) as important moderators of the proposed relationships.

The present investigation consists of a two-study research design, based on data collected from young adult samples across two culturally different countries, namely the UK (N = 267) and Japan (N = 127).

The study presents evidence of self-perceptions of leadership influencing LSE and MTL. The results further support the mediating role of leader self-efficacy. Regarding the moderating role of gender, results in both samples showed that the effects of leader self-efficacy on MTL were stronger for males. SES was found to moderate the effects of leadership self-perceptions of negative implicit leadership theories (ILTs) on LSE in the UK sample and the effects of leadership self-perceptions of positive ILTs on LSE in the Japanese sample.

This study fills the gap of empirical research focused on early adulthood influences on leadership development. In particular, this study has a three-fold contribution, by, firstly, developing a conceptual model that examines the role of young adults' self-perceptions of leadership on their self-efficacy as leaders and MTL; secondly examining contingencies of the proposed relationships; and thirdly testing the conceptual model in two countries.