Prophets vs. profits: How market competition influences leaders' disciplining behavior towards ethical transgressions

We investigate how market competition influences the way leaders discipline employees' ethical transgressions. A cross-sectional study among organizational leaders (Study 1) revealed that strong market competition is related to an instrumental decision frame (business practices are more focused on serving the organization's interest). This decision frame explains why strong market competition is related to leaders' perceptions of the evaluation of wrongdoing in terms of instrumental rather than moral concerns. Two experiments (Studies 2 and 3) show that increased market competition makes leaders' disciplining of ethical transgressions more contingent upon the transgression's instrumentality to the organization: the same ethical transgression is punished less when it resulted in profit than when it resulted in loss. This research is among the first to identify conditions that determine disciplinary responses of organization leaders to ethical transgressions, and it feeds the debate on whether market competition promotes the display of unethical behavior within organizations.     

Beauty is in the in-group of the beholded: Intergroup differences in the perceived attractiveness of leaders

Physical attractiveness is most commonly presumed to be an exogenous characteristic that influences people's feelings, perceptions, and behavior across myriad types of relationships. We investigate the opposite prediction in which feelings toward other people influence the perceptions of others' attractiveness. Focusing specifically on subordinates' perceptions of leaders of in-groups and out-groups, we examine whether group membership moderates familiarity in relation to ratings of physical attractiveness. Studies 1 and 2 show that subordinates rate the leaders of their in-groups as significantly more physically attractive than comparably familiar out-group leaders. Our findings have relevance for understanding the interactive roles of physical attractiveness within contemporary organizational environments and help to account for variance in interpersonal perceptions on the basis of group membership. In contrast with research traditions that treat physical attractiveness as a static trait, our findings highlight the importance of group membership as a lens for perceiving familiar leaders' physical attractiveness.     

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.     

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.     

Reducing turnover intent: supervisor and co-worker incivility and socialization-related learning

Emerging leaders are involved in a continual learning process that includes professional and personal identities that intersect and diverge. The identities are coupled with multiple roles and expectations that are embedded within work and non-work identities. This paper examines the impact of leadership development programmes on emerging leaders including the expectations and job demands that are integral to leadership work. More specifically, the paper examines the discourse between work and non-work identities and the strategies of leaders and organizations to strengthen or modify those identities. Monthly Activity Reports prepared by leadership participants were examined and used to support the findings. Additionally, environmental factors that shape the leaders' thoughts and behaviours were examined as the leaders struggled to maintain their core beliefs and work practices in a quest to become leaders or loyalists.     

How leadership matters: The effects of leaders' alignment on strategy implementation

Research has confirmed that leader behavior influences group and organizational behavior, but we know less about how senior leaders ensure that group and organizational members implement their decisions. Most organizations have multiple layers of leaders, implying that any single leader does not lead in isolation. We focused on how the consistency of leadership effectiveness across hierarchical levels influenced the implementation of a strategic initiative in a large health care system. We found that it was only when leaders' effectiveness at different levels was considered in the aggregate that significant performance improvement occurred. We discuss the implications of these findings for leadership research, specifically, that leaders at various levels should be considered collectively to understand how leadership influences employee performance.     

A capability approach to organizational talent management

This article takes a fresh and radical look at organizational talent management strategies. It offers a critique of some of the prevalent assumptions underpinning certain talent management practices, particularly those fuelled by the narratives of scarcity and metaphors of war. We argue that talent management programmes based on these assumptions ignore important social and ethical dimensions, to the detriment of both organizations and individuals. We offer instead a set of principles proceeding from, and informed by, Sen's ‘capability approach’ (CA). Based on the idea of freedoms not resources, the CA circumvents discourses of scarcity and restores vital social and ethical considerations to ideas about talent management. We also emphasize its versatility and sensitivity to the particular circumstances of individual organizations such that corporate leaders and human resource practitioners might use the principles for a number of practical purposes.     

"A sound track of your life": music in contemporary UK funerals

This article considers the role that music plays in contemporary UK funerals and the meaning that the funeral music has for bereaved families. It is based on findings from a recently completed study of 46 funerals funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. Music contributes to the public ceremony and the personal existential quest of the bereaved. It is important to both the content and process of the contemporary funeral, an event of deep cultural significance in our response as individuals and communities to death and the loss of a significant relationship. There is evidence that for many people, the music chosen and used also evokes and conveys their spirituality. Spirituality may not be intrinsic to the music but spiritual experience may result from the meaning that the music has for that particular person.     

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.     

Tell us about your leadership style: A structured interview approach for assessing leadership behavior constructs

It is widely recognized that leadership behaviors drive leaders' success. But despite the importance of assessing leadership behavior for selection and development, current measurement practices are limited. This study contributes to the literature by examining the structured interview method as a potential approach to assess leadership behavior. To this end, we developed a structured interview measuring constructs from Yukl's (2012) leadership taxonomy. Supervisors in diverse positions participated in the interview as part of a leadership assessment program. Confirmatory factor analyses supported the assumption that leadership constructs could be assessed as distinct interview dimensions. Results further showed that interview ratings predicted a variety of leadership outcomes (supervisors' annual income, ratings of situational leader effectiveness, subordinates' well-being and affective organizational commitment) beyond other relevant predictors. Findings offer implications on how to identify leaders who have a positive impact on their subordinates, and they inform us about conceptual differences between leadership measures.     

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.     

The role of employees' OCB and leaders' hindrance stress in the emergence of self-serving leadership

Media reports on self-serving leadership primarily focused on the negative consequences of such behavior for employees. However, much remains to be understood about the antecedents of self-serving behavior of leaders. In the present research we explore the role of employees' organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) in the emergence of self-serving leadership. Using one multi-source field study and three experiments, we showed that employees' OCB towards coworkers (OCBI) negatively impacted self-serving leadership. Moreover, we also examine the underlying mechanism for this relation. Results indicate that employees' OCBI mitigated leaders' hindrance stress, which mediates the relationship between OCBI and self-serving leadership. As such, our findings indicate that self-serving leaders are not necessarily inherently bad and that employees have an important role in shaping leaders' self-serving behavior.     

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.     

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.     

Development of leadership skills: Experience and timing

To develop organizational leaders we need to understand how requisite skills are acquired over the course of people's careers. In this article, a cross-sectional design was used to assess differences in leadership skills across six grade levels of officers in the U.S. Army. Increased levels of knowledge, problem-solving skills, systems skills, and social skills were found at higher grade levels. Certain skills and experiences, however, were found to be particularly important at certain phases of leaders' careers. These findings are used to propose an organization-based model of skill development. Implications of this model for leader development programs are discussed.     

Leadership as social identity management: Introducing the Identity Leadership Inventory (ILI) to assess and validate a four-dimensional model

Although nearly two decades of research have provided support for the social identity approach to leadership, most previous work has focused on leaders' identity prototypicality while neglecting the assessment of other equally important dimensions of social identity management. However, recent theoretical developments have argued that in order to mobilize and direct followers' energies, leaders need not only to ‘be one of us’ (identity prototypicality), but also to ‘do it for us’ (identity advancement), to ‘craft a sense of us’ (identity entrepreneurship), and to ‘embed a sense of us’ (identity impresarioship). In the present research we develop and validate an Identity Leadership Inventory (ILI) that assesses these dimensions in different contexts and with diverse samples from the US, China, and Belgium. Study 1 demonstrates that the scale has content validity such that the items meaningfully differentiate between the four dimensions. Studies 2, 3, and 4 provide evidence for the scale's construct validity (distinguishing between dimensions), discriminant validity (distinguishing identity leadership from authentic leadership, leaders' charisma, and perceived leader quality), and criterion validity (relating the ILI to key leadership outcomes). We conclude that by assessing multiple facets of leaders' social identity management the ILI has significant utility for both theory and practice.     

Leaders' impression management during organizational decline: The roles of publicity,image concerns,and incentive compensation

In this study, we develop and examine a model of leaders' impression management during organizational decline by elaborating on the roles of publicity, image concerns, and incentive compensation. We propose that the publicity of decline is an important antecedent of leaders' impression management during decline. We also examine how leaders' image concerns mediate this positive relationship. In addition, we consider the relative influence of incentive compensation and fixed compensation on the relationship between leaders' image concerns and their impression management during decline. Our results, based on a specially-designed management simulation game conducted with experienced Chinese managers, show that high publicity of decline elevates leaders' image concerns, which in turn increases their impression management during decline. In addition, incentive compensation strengthens rather than weakens the effects of leaders' image concerns on their impression management. We discuss the implications of leaders' impression management during organizational decline.     

The influence of leader core self-evaluation on follower reports of transformational leadership

The role of leader core self-evaluations (CSE) was investigated for its influence on follower perceptions of transformational leadership (TFL) dimensions in a sample of 464 employees and 150 leaders from three Chinese organizations. As hypothesized, after controlling for leaders' and followers' demographic variables and modeling fixed-effects to account for the potential impact of omitted variables, we found that leader CSE was significantly and positively related to follower perception of leader TFL. The result enhances the understanding of TFL antecedents.     

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.     

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.