Exploring why leaders do what they do: An integrative review of the situation-trait approach and situation-encoding schemas

In order to enhance leaders' effectiveness, it is critical to clearly and accurately understand the underlying processes that contribute to leaders' decision making and behavior. The traditional trait approach to understanding leaders' underlying processing carries limitations and does not capture any of the situational characteristics that may be important. We thus advance the situation-trait approach by introducing the Cognitive Affective Processing Systems framework more fully into the leadership domain. A primary benefit of integrating this framework is that it identifies an attribute largely overlooked by leadership scholars, yet foundational to leaders' processing and behaviors: situation-encoding schemas. We integrate and review decades of research on four sets of situation-encoding schemas to demonstrate their important role in determining why leaders do what they do. This consensus shift, novel focus on situation-encoding schemas, and integration of four disparate sets of well-studied situation-encoding schemas has important implications for leaders' self-awareness, meta-cognition, effectiveness, and development.     

The weakness of strong ties: Sampling bias,social ties,and nepotism in family business succession

Decision-making is a complex cognitive activity filled with bias. Leader decision-making is unique because it occurs in a social context. We examine how biases resulting from social network dynamics complicate leaders' decision-making. In particular, we focus on a specific case of leader cognition: nepotism in the succession decisions in the context of family businesses. Succession often leads to a decline in performance because leaders frequently choose family members as their successor, a form of nepotism. We show that even when a leader can overcome individual decision biases, a bias in sampling resulting from families' strong ties can still allow a leader to wrongly conclude that family members are better qualified than external candidates when the opposite is true. We demonstrate this phenomenon using simulation modeling and explore solutions to family business succession planning.     

The social role theory of unethical leadership

Challenging the standard reasoning regarding leaders' ethical failures, we argue that a potent contributor to these failures is the social role expectations of leaders. We maintain that leaders' central role expectation of goal achievement contributes to the over-valuing of group goals and greater moral permissibility of the means used to achieve these goals. In studies 1 and 2 we demonstrated that the role of leader, relative to group member, is associated with an increased appraisal of group goals which is predicted by the leaders' role expectations and not driven by the psychological effects of power. Next, we experimentally demonstrated the importance of both role expectations of leadership and group goal importance in leaders' justification to engage in morally questionable behavior to achieve group goals. Finally, we supported the social role predictions in a laboratory experiment by assigning people to roles and assessing goal importance and unethical decision-making and behaviors.     

Leadership wholeness: a human resource development model

This paper presents a phenomenological study of leaders' quest for wholeness from the perspective of contemporary human resource development (HRD). The experience of economic, ethical and spiritual crises in contemporary society, especially in organizational leadership, calls for a deeper quest for meaning and wholeness. However, little is known about how prominent leaders across the world and cultures, who have a reputation for wholeness, experience their journey. In order to gain insight into lived experience, 10 top spiritual leaders from different organizational contexts and across the globe engaged in in-depth conversational interviews to describe their experience of the quest. Four essential themes of spiritual leaders' quest for wholeness emerged from an analysis of the interview texts: (1) experiencing existential crisis; (2) embracing light and shadow; (3) unfolding ultimate dimension of being; (4) fostering an ethic of co-responsibility. From the analysis of the themes, a model of wholeness was constructed from a human resource development point of view: the Leadership Wholeness Model portrays the intra-dynamics of leaders' ongoing quest for wholeness penetrating through their existential, learning, spiritual, and moral dimensions of being and five ethical dimensions of wholeness permeating through the personal, organizational, social, global, and environmental spheres of life.     

When do leaders sacrifice?: The effects of sense of power and belongingness on leader self-sacrifice

Past research on leader self-sacrifice has focused entirely on the effects of this leader behavior on followers and its implications for organizations. The present research focused on antecedents of leader self-sacrifice. We argued that self-sacrifice is positively influenced by leaders' sense of belongingness to the group they supervise. Furthermore, leaders' subjectively sensed power can serve as a moderator of this effect. We expected this because a high sense of power is known to facilitate goal pursuit. Given that organizational goals often prescribe serving the interests of the organization, leaders' sense of belongingness should promote self-sacrifice particularly among leaders low in subjective power; leaders high in subjective power should display self-sacrifice regardless of their sense of belongingness. Two field studies supported these predictions. A final experiment supported a critical assumption underlying our argument in showing that the sense of power × sense of belongingness interaction is restricted to situations that prescribe cooperative goals. When situations prescribe competitive goals, this interaction was absent.     

Physiological arousal variability accompanying relations-oriented behaviors of effective leaders: Triangulating skin conductance,video-based behavior coding and perceived effectiveness

With the aim of extending the healthy physiological variability thesis to Leadership Studies, we examined the hypothesized links among leaders' within-person variability in physiological arousal, their task- and relations-oriented behaviors and their overall effectiveness. During regularly-held staff meetings, wristband skin sensors and video cameras captured synchronized physiological and fine-grained behavioral data of 36 leaders within one organization. Perceived leader effectiveness ratings were obtained from their followers. Multi-level log-linear analyses showed no elevated levels of arousal during the task-oriented behaviors of both the highly effective and the less effective leaders. The highly effective leaders showed a significantly greater likelihood of high levels of physiological arousal during positive and negative relations-oriented behaviors. We thus report a physiological correlate of relations-oriented leader behavior; especially among the most effective leaders, higher levels of arousal co-occurred with their positive and negative relations-oriented behavior in the meetings. Having used two high-resolution methods to advance insights about effective organizational leadership, this field study illuminates the importance of capturing the co-occurrence of within-person variability in leaders' bodily responses and their precisely measured behaviors over time in a functional social setting at work.     

Leaders' conceptions of followers: Implications for naturally occurring Pygmalion effects

We investigated the relationships between leaders' implicit followership theories (LIFTs) (conceptions of followers) and naturally occurring Pygmalion effects (leaders' high performance expectations that improve follower performance). Results based on 151 workplace leader–follower dyads supported a model of naturally occurring Pygmalion effects. Positive LIFTs led to higher performance expectations, liking, and relationship quality from leaders, which impacted follower performance. Supervisory experience moderated the relationship between positive LIFTs and leaders' performance expectations for their followers, such that the performance expectations of leaders with less supervisory experience were more strongly influenced by their conceptions of followers. Implications of the findings for improving follower performance are discussed. Suggestions for future research are offered: antecedents of LIFTs, negative LIFTs, Golem effects, and role reversed Pygmalion effects, among others.     

The role of attribution in how followers respond to the emotional expression of male and female leaders

We investigated how leaders' gender interacts with anger and sadness expression and followers' attributions for their emotional expression on evaluations made by followers. In a laboratory study concerning hypothetical leaders, people evaluated the competence of male and female leaders differently depending on their emotional displays (anger vs. sadness). These differences were observed only when observers made high dispositional attributions for leaders' emotional expression. Perceived leader role-based emotional expression mediated these relationships. In a field study concerning actual leaders, dispositional attributions for sadness and anger expression were negatively related to follower perceptions of the leader, and these attributions moderated the relationships between leader gender and various follower perceptions of the leader. Leader prototype fit mediated these relationships. We discuss the implications of these findings for leadership research and practice.     

Does power corrupt the mind? The influence of power on moral reasoning and self-interested behavior

We test whether leaders' power shapes their reasoning about moral issues and whether such moral reasoning subsequently influences leaders' display of self-interested behavior. We use an incentivized experiment to manipulate two components of leader power: power over more versus fewer followers and power to enforce one's will by having discretion over more versus fewer payout options to allocate between oneself and one's followers. We find that having power over more followers decreased leaders' principled moral reasoning, whereas having higher power to enforce one's will enabled leaders to engage in self-interested behavior. We also find suggestive evidence that power over increases self-interested behavior by decreasing principled moral reasoning; the effect of power to was not mediated by moral reasoning. These results illustrate that power activates self-interest within and outside the context in which power is held. They also show that moral reasoning is not a stable cognitive process, but that it might represent an additional path via which power affects self-interested behavior.     

市场竞争下企业股权融资的供应链模型分析

股权融资是企业在市场竞争中抢占市场份额、实现跨越式发展的重要融资途径,企业融资决策的制定必须考虑产品市场上企业间的竞争行为.构建了双寡头零售商的股权融资模型,探讨零售商采取股权融资进行市场开拓时,市场竞争对其股权融资决策的作用机理.核心的发现是:零售商的股权融资应考虑不同成长性下市场竞争的直接和间接影响,市场竞争抑制(促进)了低成长性(高成长性)零售商的股权融资.供应商参与博弈后,零售商的融资策略取决于不同初始市场规模和成长性下的市场竞争与市场开拓之间的权衡.     

Does valuing androgyny and femininity lead to a female advantage? The relationship between gender-role,transformational leadership and identification

The notion of ‘think manager–think male’ has been demonstrated in many studies. The current study examines whether leaders are perceived as more effective when they have ‘feminine’, ‘masculine’ or ‘androgynous’ characteristics, and how this relates to the leader's and followers' sex. Using carefully matched samples of 930 employees of 76 bank managers, we studied the relationship between managers' gender-role identity (perceived ‘femininity’, ‘masculinity’ and ‘androgyny’) and how this relates to leadership effectiveness in terms of transformational leadership and personal identification with the leader. Our findings show that among both male and female leaders, ‘androgyny’ was more strongly related to transformational leadership and followers' identification than ‘non-androgyny’, and that leaders' ‘femininity’ was more strongly related to leadership effectiveness than ‘masculinity’. Furthermore, the results show that women paid a higher penalty for not being perceived as ‘androgynous’ (mixing ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’), in comparison to men with regard to personal identification. When examining same- versus cross-sex relationships, we found that ‘non-androgynous’ male managers were rated higher by their male employees than by their female employees. Our findings suggest that women and men who are interested in being perceived as effective leaders may be well advised to blend ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ behaviors, and even more so when they are in situations of non-congruency (i.e., women in leadership roles and leading in cross-sex relationships). We discuss the implications of these findings for both theory and practice.     

How leaders' emotional displays shape followers' organizational citizenship behavior

We examined the effects of happy and angry expressions of leaders on followers' organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). OCB involves behaviors that benefit an organization, but fall outside of formal job requirements and reward structures (Bateman & Organ, 1983). We show that leaders' emotional displays play a role in encouraging or discouraging OCB. In contrast to previous evidence that anger displays can increase follower motivation and in-role performance, Study 1 (a scenario study among employees of various companies) revealed a decrease in willingness to perform OCB after a leader expressed anger rather than happiness. In Study 2 (a lab experiment involving university students), participants expended less effort working overtime after being confronted with an angry rather than a happy leader. In both studies, the detrimental effects of anger were stronger when the anger was perceived as inappropriate. We conclude that anger may decrease OCB, especially when the target considers it inappropriate.     

Mutuality in leader–subordinate empowerment expectation: Its impact on role ambiguity and intrinsic motivation

Drawing on leader role set theory, we examine the relationship between the congruence of leaders' and subordinates' empowerment expectations and subordinates' experiences of role ambiguity and intrinsic motivation. Based on cross-level polynomial regression analysis using 168 subordinates and 33 leaders, the results indicated that the relationship between congruence and role ambiguity and intrinsic motivation vary depending on whether leaders misevaluate subordinate empowerment expectations, as well as whether the expectations match. Specifically, subordinates had low role ambiguity and low intrinsic motivation when leaders' and subordinates' empowerment expectations matched at low levels and when leaders underestimated subordinates' empowerment expectations. However, subordinates had low role ambiguity and high intrinsic motivation when expectations matched at high levels. Furthermore, role ambiguity was high and intrinsic motivation was low when the leaders overestimated subordinates' empowerment expectations. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Preemptive or promotive: The differential impact of strategic leaders’ political connections on firm long-term investment in China

Research on corporate leaders' political connections has remained silent on the impact of heterogeneity of political resources on firm behaviors and of how strategic leaders differentially leverage these resources. We propose that a firm whose chair had ascribed bureaucratic connections as opposed to achieved political connections acquires different types of resources and chair differentially leverages the resources when making long-term investment. These effects are weaker when a firm is performing well. Our analyses of Chinese firms from 2003 to 2016 generally support these predictions. This study contributes to literature on political connections by providing greater specificity with respect to the heterogeneity of political resources and offering new insights into how strategic leaders leverage these resources. This study also contributes to the literature on board chairs and corporate governance by suggesting that when considering a firm's long-term plan, chair plays an important role and it is also important to monitor chair behaviors. Finally, it highlights the role of the interface between strategic leaders and state matters when considering the antecedents of long-term investment.     

Charisma and organizational change: A multilevel study of perceived charisma,commitment to change,and team performance

What makes people perceive a leader as charismatic, and how do team leaders obtain performance outcomes from their followers? We examine leaders in times of organizational change and investigate the mechanisms through which leaders' change-promoting behaviors are associated with team performance. In a multilevel mediation model, we propose that the indirect relationship between change-promoting behaviors and team performance is sequentially transmitted through followers' perceptions of charisma and followers' commitment to change. A study of 33 leaders and 142 followers provides empirical support for the model, using multilevel structural equation modeling to analyze top-down relationships between leaders and followers and bottom-up relationships between followers and team outcomes. Results suggest that team leaders are perceived as more charismatic when they engage in change-promoting behaviors. These behaviors facilitate team performance through individual followers' perceived charisma and commitment to change.     

Ethics,character, and authentic transformational leadership behavior

The morality of transformational leadership has been sharply questioned, particularly by libertarians, “grass roots” theorists, and organizational development consultants. This paper argues that to be truly transformational, leadership must be grounded in moral foundations. The four components of authentic transformational leadership (idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration) are contrasted with their counterfeits in dissembling pseudo-transformational leadership on the basis of (1) the moral character of the leaders and their concerns for self and others; (2) the ethical values embedded in the leaders' vision, articulation, and program, which followers can embrace or reject; and (3) the morality of the processes of social ethical choices and action in which the leaders and followers engage and collectively pursue.The literature on transformational leadership is linked to the long-standing literature on virtue and moral character, as exemplified by Socratic and Confucian typologies. It is related as well to the major themes of the modern Western ethical agenda: liberty, utility, and distributive justice Deception, sophistry, and pretense are examined alongside issues of transcendence, agency, trust, striving for congruence in values, cooperative action, power, persuasion, and corporate governance to establish the strategic and moral foundations of authentic transformational leadership.     

Leadership and Effectiveness in the Context of Gender: The Role of Leaders' Verbal Behaviour*

This field study focuses on verbal consideration, which is a leadership behaviour that expresses esteem for the follower and her or his work, knowledge and opinion. It was assumed that the relationship between verbal consideration and various outcomes is moderated by the leader's gender. One‐hundred‐and‐forty leaders and 455 of their direct followers were surveyed in a one‐wave questionnaire study in Germany. Male and female leaders showed the same degree of verbal consideration as rated by their followers. Verbal consideration is related to three out of four outcome variables for both sexes. One unexpected moderating effect of leaders' gender was found: followers of male leaders displaying verbal consideration report less ‘irritation’ (a state of exhaustion considered a threat to good task fulfilment). One explanation may be that male leaders get ‘extra credit’ for showing verbal consideration as it may be thought to entail special effort, whereas for female leaders it may be seen as normal and routine. This assumption should be examined in further studies in order to get more information about the different mechanisms by which female and male leaders reach the same quality of outcomes.     

The effects of authentic leadership on followers' ethical decision-making in the face of temptation: An experimental study

The present research investigates the impact of authentic leadership on followers' morality, operationalized as ethical decision-making, in the face of temptation. This experiment finds that authentic leadership and temptation interacted to affect individuals' ethical decision-making. Specifically, authentic leadership significantly inhibited individuals' from making unethical decisions in the face of temptation, whereas followers of neutral or less authentic leaders were more likely to succumb to temptation. Authentic leadership did not have a significant impact on ethical decision-making when temptation was absent. Further, results showed a significant moderated-mediated effect whereby the interactive effect of authentic leadership and temptation on individuals' guilt appraisal was mediated through the nature of the ethical decision. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Leaders' relational self-concept and followers' task performance: Implications for mentoring provided to followers

Using a sample of 137 leader–follower dyads, this study investigated how leaders' relational self-concept relates to the mentoring (career support and psychosocial support) they provide to their followers, and whether followers' task performance moderates this relationship. As expected, leaders with a stronger relational self-concept provided more career support to followers who displayed higher (vs. lower) task performance. However, leaders' relational self-concept was unrelated to their provision of psychosocial support, irrespective of followers' task performance.     

Leader decision speed as a signal of honesty

Decision speed is emerging as an important topic to organizations, yet its consequences for leaders have received little research attention. The present research builds on this notion by examining how the speed with which leaders come to decisions shapes observers' perceptions and behaviors. In three incentivized experiments, participants evaluated leaders who decided whether to include or exclude followers from participating in consequential decisions. Leaders were seen as more honest when they were fast (vs. slow) to include followers, but as less honest when they were fast (vs. slow) to exclude followers from decisions. These perceptions influenced several key outcomes: the willingness to reward leaders (Experiment 1) and the willingness to cooperate with leaders (Experiment 3). Consistent with a signaling perspective, these effects disappeared when observers learned that leaders were externally pressed to decide quickly or slowly (Experiment 2). The present research offers new insights into the cues that people use when judging leaders' decision-making processes, and the behavioral consequences of these judgments.