HC 3: Follower-Centric Approaches Flashcards
Dominance of leader-centric research: explain through Hitler and 6 million kills
The significance of this oversight seems readily apparent when contemplating the causes of consequential events.
For instance, readers might consider that despite widespread belief that Hitler was personally responsible for the genocide of 6 million Jews during World War II,
not a single individual died at his hands (Goldhagen, 2009).
Without the obedience, fanaticism, fervor, or support of followers, each of these genocidal directives would have been ineffectual.
Leader-centric models vs follower-centric models
Leader-centric models:
Emphasize systematic variance due to
leaders
Follower-centric models:
Emphasize systematic variance due to
followers
Importance of followers (3)
Followers: 1) legitimize, 2) empower, and 3) provide leaders with the means to attain visions and goals.
There is no leadership without followership
and followers
Who are good followers? (5)
Individuals who are
1) proactive,
2) competent,
3) self-managing,
4) high in integrity,
5) and willingly contribute to the success of their group/ organizations
Good followers help drive outstanding outcomes, push their leaders to improve
What is true and false about followers?
False: Followers are not passive part of the
environment to be acted on by leaders.
True: Followers are agentic, intelligent beings
who actively try to understand and shape
their environment
The Eye of the Beholder
- variance
- perceived intelligence
- perceived competence
20% of variance in leadership ratings is idiosyncratic (= unusual feature or habit of a person) (Livi et al., 2008)
Perceived intelligence predicts leader
emergence (Judge et al., 2004)
Perceived competence predicts who is
influential in a group (Anderson & Kilduff, 2009)
Leadership as a social construct: intelligence
However there is still substantial agreement on who is the leader, and this agreement increases with group size
That does not mean that actual intelligence and competence are unimportant, in fact they are very likely to be positively correlated.
These studies suggest that these perceptions are mediators of the relationship between actual intelligence/ competence and leadership outcomes
How do followers make sense of the world? (3)
1) Reliance on stable internal mental representations (i.e., mental categories)
2) Followers are compelled to understand the world in terms of leadership
3) Doing so serves to alleviate negative emotions associated with ambiguity
Extra explanation of mental categories (follower motivation)
The emphasis of followership research has been on how do followers process the vast amount of information in everyday life.
We know that human information processing ability is limited and presents a bottleneck. So what do we do?
Categories allow us to comprehend, understand, explain, attribute, extrapolate and predict
Mental categories guide what we pay attention to
This doesn’t happen randomly, neither we as humans just passively observe and record what we see- sensemaking is a goal directed activity
These categories are powerful- stereotypes – For example leaders of political parties we do not support will be on average viewed less favorably than those of the party we support
The Romance of Leadership
Humans have developed a highly romanticized, heroic views of leadership and what leaders do
A widely held implicit theory about the importance of leaders and leadership, that observers hold and utilize when they are attempting to comprehend the causes, nature and consequences of organizational/ group activities
Perceivers utilize the leader category to organize, understand, and predict the world. Functionally, the leader category reduces our uncertainty and anxiety and
allows us to “come to grips with the cognitive and moral complexities of understanding the myriad interactions among the causal forces that create and maintain organized activity”
The Romance of Leadership - Evidence 2 kinds of research
Archival studies showed that during times of extreme performance interest in leadership rapidly increased
Experimental studies showed that extreme performance led individuals to accentuate leadership
The Romance of Leadership explanation of
- Meindl et al. completed a series of vignette studies
As indexed by the number of articles written in The Wall Street Journal about leadership and dissertations completed on the topic.
Seemingly, in extreme situations, people turn to leadership.
To directly test this idea, Meindl et al. completed a series of vignette studies in which participants read about companies that had performed positively or negatively to varying degrees (e.g., high, medium, low).
After reading the vignettes, participants were asked to account for company performance by evaluating the causal significance of several factors.
Relative to the alternative explanations (e.g., economy), under extreme performance (regardless of valence),
Results during time of crisis: romance of leadership (2)
- People act more charismatically
- Are more susceptible to charismatic influence
Crisis measures positively correlated with measures of presidential charisma among US Presidents
WHY? During time of crisis: Romance of Leadership
Crises generate ambiguity, and uncertainty, which induce negative emotions and anxiety –
as we fundamentally want to see the world as predictable
Interestingly these effects of crisis are temporary- as perceptions of leader charisma reduce rapidly once the crisis is over
Heightened Psycho-Physiological Arousal - Romance of Leadership
1) Increased perception of leader charisma
after physical exertion (Pastor et al., 2007),
2) Or reminding participants of their own
mortality (Landau et al., 2009)
