Leadership Processes and Follower Self-identity

Robert G. Lord, Douglas J. Brown

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781135646394
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Presenting a follower-centered perspective on leadership, this book focuses on followers as the direct determinant of leadership effects because it is generally through follower reactions and behaviors that leadership attempts succeed or fail. Therefore, leadership theory needs to be articulated with a theory of how followers create meaning from leadership acts and how this meaning helps followers self-regulate in specific contexts. In this book, an attempt is made to develop such a theory, maintaining that the central construct in this process is the self-identity of followers. In developing this theoretical perspective, the authors draw heavily from several areas of research and theory. The most critical constructs do not come directly from the leadership literature, but from social and cognitive theory pertaining to follower's self-identity, self-regulatory processes, motivation, values, cognitions, and emotions and perceptions of social justice. Leaders may have profound effects on these aspects of followers and it is by analyzing such indirect, follower-mediated leadership effects that most ideas regarding leadership theory and practice are developed. Due to its broad theoretical focus, this book is relevant to a number of audiences. The authors' principal concern is with the development of leadership theory and the practice of leadership making the book relevant to audiences in management, applied psychology, and social psychology. They have tried to clearly define key constructs and provide practical examples so that the book could be accessible to advanced undergraduate students. However, the diversity of the underlying theoretical literatures and the complexity of the framework developed also make the book appropriate for graduate courses in those disciplines, and for readers with a professional interest in leadership theory or practice.

1

Common Sense, Science, and Leadership

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“You can dream, create, design and build the most wonderful place in the world … but it requires people to make the dream a reality.”

—Walt Disney (www.quotemeonit.com)

“The great leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things; he is the one who gets the people to do the greatest things.”

—Ronald Reagan (cited in Strock, 1998, p. 17)

“But I was moved by more than what he stood for or how much he knew. It was how I felt around him.…”

—George Stephanopoulis (1999, p. 31)

What is the meaning of leadership? The three quotes that begin this book provide some hint to the reader into our thinking on the topic. In combination, these quotes foreshadow two of the key themes that run as undercurrents throughout our book. In the first two quotes, attributed to Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan, a similar sense of leadership has been expressed. Together the Disney and Regan quotes share a common ideal: Leadership cannot simply be reduced to a single great mind or individual. Instead both quotes suggest that the accomplishments of great people are at best indirect, operating through the accomplishments and actions of others.

In the third quote, attributed to George Stephanopoulis, a related idea has been communicated, but this time from a subordinate’s perspective. This quote, drawn from Stephanopoulis’ recollections of his earliest encounters with Bill Clinton, suggest that in part Clinton’s power derived not from his words or actions but rather from his ability to shift how George Stephanopoulis felt about himself.

In combination the messages communicated in these quotes succinctly express the definition of leadership that we develop throughout this book: Leadership is a process through which one individual, the leader, changes the way followers envision themselves. By shifting followers’ conceptions of their identity, leaders often generate extraordinary outcomes for their nations, institutions, organizations, and work groups. Such leaders change our perceptions of how we are now and how we may be in the future or whether we see ourselves as autonomous individuals or as members of larger collectives. This has profound implications for how we think, feel, and behave. In psychological terms, such leaders work though changing the composition of followers’ self-concepts.

The importance of subordinate self-concepts to leadership processes has been the focus of a limited number of scientific articles (e.g., Lord, Brown, & Freiberg, 1999; Shamir, House, & Arthur, 1993; Shamir, Zakay, Brenin, & Popper, 1998). These articles have laid the groundwork; however, space constraints inherent in the normal journal-length articles preclude a full theoretical integration of the leadership and self-concept literatures. This limitation is not surprising given the extensive scientific treatment of each of these separate topics. A search of the psychological database indicates publication of over 7,000 articles on leadership and more than 12,000 articles on self-concept. Given the expansiveness of each of these literatures, a handful of articles cannot do justice to any integrative efforts. Thus, our overarching goal in writing this book was to present a fully elaborated model of the structure and processes of subordinate self-concepts and to describe the mapping of leadership behaviors and processes onto this structure. For example, we address issues like how a leader’s use of pronouns in communications—namely, the use of collective we pronouns vs. individualistic “I” pronouns—can activate collective or individual self-concepts in subordinates, respectively. This collective or individualistic structure can then frame many other processes, such as a subordinate’s responses to organizational events, leadership activities, or other work processes. Ironically, one of the factors that can be influenced by subordinate identities is the schema that subordinates use to evaluate leadership, a topic we discuss in more depth in a later chapter.

Because leaders are often salient and thus provide highly accessible explanations for many types of events (Phillips & Lord, 1981), attempts to understand or influence outcomes of events often focus on the qualities of leaders. Thus, much of the prior leadership literature has taken a relatively one-sided view, emphasizing the leader’s traits and behaviors but neglecting aspects of followers that moderate their responses to leadership. Early approaches to leadership focused on traits that distinguished leaders from nonleaders (Mann, 1959; Stogdill, 1948), and this approach has recently regained popularity (Hogan, Curphy, & Hogan, 1994; Lord, De Vader, Alliger, 1986). Overlapping this research, behaviorally oriented scholars focused on leadership styles and their impact on subordinate satisfaction and performance (F. E. Fiedler, 1964; Kerr & Schriesheim, 1974). More recent behaviorally oriented research has emphasized transformational leadership, a quality of leaders that involves both behaviors (Bass, 1985) and traits (Judge & Bono, 2000), that are thought to be critical in changing organizations and individuals. All of these research approaches can be characterized as leader-focused research.

These leader-focused studies have advanced our understanding of leaders; they have been less successful, however, in advancing what we know about leadership (Burns, 1978). Leaders may indeed be people who can be understood in terms of traits and behavioral styles, but leadership is a social process that involves both a leader and a follower (Graen & Scandura, 1987; Hollander, 1992; Hollander & Offermann, 1990; Lord & Maher, 1991). Although great advances have been made in terms of understanding the leader component of leadership, much less has been done to advance our understanding of followers and the psychological processes and mechanisms that link leaders and followers. Such questions as how or why leaders affect outcomes remain largely uncharted and poorly understood.

In part, we think that the neglect of processes and mechanisms that link leaders and followers stems from the primary focus of prior research. As Bobby J. Calder (1977) noted over 20 years ago, leader-centered research stems from a common sense, implicit understanding of leadership processes that view leaders as origins or causes of important outcomes. Common sense theories focus on what people can see easily, such as a leader’s behavior, rather than less observable processes, such as a subordinates’s psychological reaction to a leader’s behavior or a subordinate’s implicit theory of what leaders should be.

Calder (1997) called commonsense theories first-order constructs, and he distinguished them from second-order constructs that are grounded in scientific theory rather than a perceptually based understanding of events. Even today, leadership scholars often continue to study leadership in terms of easily observable first-order constructs like leader behaviors and their direct impact on easily measured outcomes (this perspective is shown by Path A in Fig. 1.1) rather than in terms of underlying processes and mechanisms that are derived from scientific theory. Unfortunately, easily observed relationships do not necessarily reflect the underlying causal structure of events. More specifically, even though transformational leaders may exhibit certain types of behavior, their effects on people and organizational processes may not be directly produced by these behaviors. Instead, more direct causes may lie in followers who are more proximal to the observed and desired outcomes.

For a specific example of such effects, consider Dvir, Eden, Avolio, and Shamir’s (2002) study. Using a longitudinal, randomized field experiment, Dvir et al. applied popular behavioral theories of transformational leadership to train leaders in the Israeli Defense Forces. Potential leaders (cadets in the Israeli Defense Forces officer training program) went through a 3-day workshop that embodied either the major propositions of transformational leadership theory or a blend of eclectic leadership theories. Subsequently 54 of 160 cadets were assigned to lead basic training platoons (34 who had experienced the transformational leadership [experimental] workshop and 22 who had attended the control workshop that covered eclectic leadership theories). The study then assessed the effects of training by comparing the development of noncommissioned officers (NCOs) and recruits in these experimental and control platoons. Results showed significant differences in several NCO development variables (self-efficacy, collectivist orientation, extra effort, and critical independent approach) that favored the experimental platoons; in addition, recruits in these platoons showed enhanced performance compared to control groups.

FIG. 1.1. Leader (A) and follower-centered (B and C) approaches to understanding leadership.

However, in attempting to pin down leadership behavior as the cause of performance, Dvir et al. (2002) were not very successful. They suggested that transformational leaders created “a stronger social bond among their direct and indirect followers, thus improving the indirect followers’ performance” (p. 742). Yet, they also acknowledged that several other explanations were possible. What they did not show was that the effects of transformational leadership training were directly mediated by the transformational leadership behavior of the cadets who went through the experimental workshop. Although this is an impressive field experiment, it reveals the weaknesses that a leader-focused theory has in explaining subordinate performance. Without a thorough understanding of the mechanisms linking leader activities to subordinate perceptions and subordinate reactions, we simply cannot translate leadership training programs, even when theoretically grounded, into explanations of subordinate performance.

As shown by this example, Calder’s (1977) criticism reflects a very general weakness in typical leader-focused approaches to leadership. When leadership processes are not fully understood, training that focuses on changing aspects of leaders often fails to produce the effects that would be expected based on prior research. To provide another compelling example, consider the case of the leadership research on the Pygmalion effect, which is a type of self-fulfilling prophecy in which managers are led by researchers to believe that their subordinates have higher than normal ability. These experimental manipulations of leader expectations, in turn, lead to greater performance by subordinates.

Pygmalion effects are perhaps the most carefully developed and experimentally tested field intervention in the leadership area (Eden, 1992). Eden and his students have conducted nine field experiments that generally show large effects on subordinates’ performance of experimental interventions focused on manager expectations. These interventions may require as little as 5 min to convey high expectations to managers. Nevertheless, Eden et al.’s (2000) seven different subsequent applied interventions that trained managers to convey high expectations to subordinates using workshops that varied from 1 to 3 days have consistently failed to produce higher levels of subordinate performance. As Eden et al. noted, there was little evidence that the workshop influenced follower performance; the mean size of 61 effects from the seven experiments was only .13. Again, this suggests that there is some aspect of the high expectations of leaders who were naive with respect to this manipulation in the original nine field experiments that was not present when leaders were explicitly trained to communicate high expectations to followers in the seven workshops. Perhaps expectations were communicated more genuinely when they were actually believed by managers, and subordinates may have reacted to this nonverbal aspect of leadership.

These examples reflect some of the best field research and field experiments being done in the leadership area. Yet, they still illustrate the weaknesses in leader-focused approaches. Leader-focused training emphasizes processes that are distant or distal to subordinate performance and reactions rather than being tied to processes in followers that were more proximal to the expected change. Consequently, we believe that these distal processes are the wrong place to focus when attempting to understand leadership.

There is an alternative approach to leadership that will produce both more fundamental theoretical insights and more successful leadership intervention. Namely, the typical focus on leadership inquiries can be reversed, emphasizing the follower and factors in followers that produce desired effects like high performance or organizational commitment (e.g., Path B in Fig. 1.1). We can then work backwards and ask how leaders can impact these follower processes (e.g., Path C in Fig. 1.1) Unlike traditional leader-centric perspectives shown by Path A in Fig. 1.1, which begin by documenting leader characteristics or behaviors and then linking these variables to outcomes, we advocate a process-oriented and reverse-engineered approach to leadership that is centered in followers. That is, rather than: (a) describing what leaders do, (b) examining the relationship between these activities and outcomes, and then (c) attempting to understand why leadership effects occur, our approach emphasizes second-order scientific constructs and processes that are localized in followers. After all, subordinates produce the desirable organizational effects that are generally attributed to their leaders. Thus, we maintain that the most defensible strategy for leadership research and practice is to understand factors central to subordinates’ motivation, affect, and development and then work backwards to analyze how leaders might influence these processes. That is, we should focus on Paths B and C in Fig. 1.1. Once follower-centered mechanisms and processes are understood theoretically (Path B), sound linkages can be made to associated leader behaviors or qualities (Path C).

In searching for the appropriate subordinate process to examine, we want characteristics and processes that are (a) strongly connected to subordinate motivational, affective, and developmental processes; (b) general enough to explain many different types of behavior; and (c) well-grounded in scientific research. As explained in the following section, based on these criteria, we believe that follower self-concepts should be the focus of leadership theory. We maintain that articulating the connections between leaders and subordinates’ self-concepts will provide leadership researchers with a platform to move beyond the study of leader behavior to the study of leadership.

WHY THE FOLLOWER SELF-CONCEPT?

Critical readers will no doubt question why we have selected the follower self-concept as the medium through which to understand leadership. In large part, this choice reflects our conclusion that the self-concept, as conceptualized by social, cognitive, and personality researchers, fits three key requirements for leadership theory: It can account for influence, it is internal to the subordinate, and it is a robust construct. Next, we describe each of these criteria and discuss how the self-concept meets each requirement.

Influence

Ultimately, leadership is a process of influence. In stating this we are not suggesting an idea that is new for leadership researchers. Yukl and Van Fleet’s (1992) excellent review of the leadership literature has previously noted that the single thread uniting leadership researchers is their common interest in influence, regardless of whether transformational leadership or leadership perceptions is the focus of study. In particular, how is it that a leader changes the behavior, attitudes, or reactions of a follower? Clearly, the effectiveness of a leader depends on his or her ability to change subordinates—it is fundamental to our scientific and lay understanding of leadership. For example, the firing of Toronto Blue Jays Manager Jim Fregosi following the 2000 baseball campaign was attributed to the fact that he was unable to change the intensity of his players’ play at critical times during the regular season. Ultimately, Fregosi was perceived to lack the necessary leadership ability required to raise players’ performance in key situations.

Based on this reasoning, our first assumption is that any process that underlies leadership must be dynamic and must allow leaders to originate change. As we articulate later, the dependence of followers’ self-concepts on social processes makes subordinates receptive to leader influence; thus, this fits our first criterion.

Internal to Subordinates

To our first criterion we further add that the change must occur within subordinates. That is, leaders must shift cognitive, emotional, and motivational processes within subordinates to exert influence because, as Kanfer and Klimoski (2002) put it, “these components of the human mind form the interactional nexus for ongoing transactions between internal and external forces” (p. 475). Cognitive and social-cognitive researchers have established over the last 20 years that human activity is guided by accessible knowl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Common Sense, Science, and Leadership
• Chapter 2: The Working Self-Concept and Behavior
• Chapter 3: Level and Self-Concept
• Chapter 4: Temporary and Enduring Effects of Leaders
• Chapter 5: Generating a Mental Representation of a Leader’s Behavior: Linking Perception to WSC Activation
• Chapter 6: Leadership and Emotions
• Chapter 7: Leadership and Organizational Justicewith Christopher Selenta
• Chapter 8: The Value Added by a Second-Order, Subordinate-Focused Approach to Understanding Leadership Processes
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index