Using Implicit Followership Theories to Illustrate Cognitive Schemas: An Experiential Exercise

Followership Prototypes and Roles

While the extant literature includes several articles that help us develop our understanding of IFTs and their effects, we drew on the research of Carsten, Uhl-Bien, West, Patera, and McGregor (2010) and Sy (2010) for the materials for this exercise. As such, we focus our discussion on these two studies below.

Sy (2010) conducted a series of studies in which he developed a measure of IFTs and examined their relationships with individual and organizational outcomes. Sy found that the data across his studies were represented by six factors and also found evidence that these factors could be grouped into two higher order factors, reflecting a follower prototype and a follower antiprototype. The former reflects items considered characteristic, or desirable, of followers (i.e., factors labeled industry, enthusiasm, and good citizen), while the latter is composed of less desirable follower characteristics (i.e., factors named incompetence, conformity, and insubordination; see supplementary materials). The results from the study also demonstrated a relationship between both prototypical and antiprototypical characteristics and a number of notable outcomes (e.g., trust in leadership, job satisfaction) (Sy, 2010).

Carsten et al. (2010) interviewed 31 participants in followership positions and investigated how respondents in their study conceptualized followership. Their results identified three different role orientations expressed by participants, who interpreted followership as reflecting passive, active, or proactive roles (see Supplemental Material available online). Carsten et al. (2010) described emergent themes related to each role orientation and highlighted the effects of contextual variables in influencing how people relate to and behave in followership positions—specifically focusing on the climate of the organization and the behavior of the leader.

Present Exercise

The goal of the present exercise is to provide students with an experience that illustrates the concept of cognitive schemas by asking them to reflect on their implicit theories related to followership and to consider different factors that may influence how such schemas develop.

Kolb (2015, p. 49) defines learning as “the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience.” Kolb’s learning cycle outlines the role of four skills in experiential learning—concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation (e.g., Kolb, 2015). In an effort to provide students with an opportunity for experiential learning, the present exercise targets the first three skills. More specifically, students rate a series of items as per their conceptualizations of followership and then compare their ratings with those of teammates (concrete experience), reflect on followership schemas and factors that may affect their development (reflective observation), and formulate conclusions that allow them to connect elements learned via the exercise to their understanding of schemas more generally (abstract conceptualization).

Learning Outcomes

At the end of the exercise, students should be able to:

Materials

Prior to class, instructors will need to prepare

Running and Debriefing the Exercise

The steps for running and debriefing the exercise, along with the estimated time required for each, are described in Table 1.

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Table 1.

Running the Exercise: Steps and Estimated Time Required.

Step	Objective	Description	Estimated timing
Step 1	Introduction of the theoretical concepts	Overview of core concepts that students will be asked to apply to the discussion of the exercise. For example, in the class taught by one of the authors, some of the concepts covered include an overview of what schemas are and a brief discussion of some factors that can affect how schemas develop (expanded on during the plenary).	Timing required will vary based on the number of concepts covered (likely 30-45 minutes, based on the experience of the authors).
Step 2	Introduction of the exercise (presented to the full class)	Introduce the exercise and provide an overview of the instructions for the first part of the activity (i.e., Step 3).	5 minutes
Step 3	Rating of the items (students complete this step individually)	3.1. Project a slide at the front of the class displaying the 21 items that students will be asked to rate. More specifically, this list includes the 18 items identified by Sy (2010), as well as the three role orientations identified by Carsten et al. (2010)—“has an active role,” “has a proactive role,” and “has a passive role” (available in the supplemental materials). We have found it useful to number the items on this slide, so that students may refer to specific items during the discussion period that follows. 3.2. First, ask students to rate the items (whether on a piece of paper or a computer), based on the degree to which each reflects a follower, using a 7-point scale provided on the slide (1 = extremely inaccurate, 7 = extremely accurate). 3.3. Next, ask students to write down their five highest and five lowest rated items on the two sets of sticky notes provided. As noted in the materials section, each student is given 10 sticky notes at the outset of the exercise: 5 of one color (Color A) and 5 of a second color (Color B). Specify which color of sticky notes they should use to record their five highest rated items and which to use to record their five lowest rated items.	10 minutes
Step 4	Reflection questions and creation of a collage (in small groups or, if students prefer, individually)	In this step, students reflect on their highest and lowest rated items, as well as several discussion questions, presented on a new slide. As some students may not be comfortable sharing their ratings with their colleagues, we have found it useful to provide students with the option to work in small groups or alone. 4.1. First, ask students to create a sticky note collage on the surface of your choice (wall, table, etc.). The purpose of the collage is to aggregate the items in a creative manner and provide a visual depiction of how group members view followers. At the same time as working on their collages, ask students to group the sticky notes together based on similar item patterns or themes. For example, if four members agree that “loyal” is one of their highest or lowest rated items, they can cluster these four sticky notes together. This procedure allows group members to see the items that were selected most often and the overall breadth of items selected (suggesting that IFTs are complex and may differ among group members). Relatedly, as students are given different color sticky notes to indicate the items that they rate as most/least representative of followers (Color A and Color B), some groups may find that the same item was rated as highly representative by some members, while assessed as less representative by others. 4.2. Next, ask students to also consider the following three discussion questions: 1. What does followership mean to you? 2. What factors might have influenced your schema about followership (i.e., role schema)? In other words, how do we develop such schemas (how do they form)? 3. When you consider how you rated the items on the slide, what underlying assumptions are present in your responses?	15-20 minutes
Step 5	Plenary/Debriefing (class discussion)	Reconvene for a plenary discussion. The plenary provides students with an opportunity to share their thoughts, observations, and takeaways from the exercise. Instructors can also elaborate on each of the discussion questions and suggest links between course concepts (see the section on Reflection Questions).	20 minutes

Variations

Please see the appendix for a discussion of additional concepts related to perception that may be incorporated into the debriefing session, as well as two potential variations of the exercise, in which we suggest (1) how instructors might incorporate implicit leadership theories into the exercise and (2) how the exercise might be modified for online courses.