Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies

This research explores the nature of collective leadership by examining the boundary conditions of how and when it relates to unit functioning. Building from a contingency perspective that considers the impact of contextual factors, we propose that collective charismatic leadership will be associated with lowered unit conflict, and this relationship will be strengthened by the contingency elements of individual charismatic leadership, task complexity, and social inclusion. Furthermore, we propose that the interactions of collective charismatic leadership with these contextual factors will relate to performance and satisfaction through conflict. We examine our hypotheses across two unit-level field studies, and the results illustrated that high levels of these contextual factors enhanced the negative relationship between collective charismatic leadership and conflict, which generally mediated the relationships between these interactive effects and performance and satisfaction. The results also highlight the detrimental aspects of collective leadership and how it can relate to reduced unit functioning when it is not aligned with an appropriate context. Overall, these findings begin to provide a more complete picture of collective leadership from a contingency perspective through a greater understanding of when and how it is related to unit functioning.

The topic of work engagement is moving up on the managerial agenda as it sets the stage for numerous beneficial outcomes for both organizations and their employees. It is clear, however, that not all employees are equally engaged in their job. The current study taps into theory on positive self-fulfilling prophecies induced by leaders’ high expectations of followers (i.e., the Pygmalion effect) and examines their potential to facilitate follower work engagement. By integrating literature on implicit followership theories with the Pygmalion model, we investigate the assumption that leaders’ high expectations are universally perceived as and therefore foster the same desirable results for all employees. We argue and find that the extent to which followers’ work engagement benefits from high leader expectations depends on their implicit followership theory of industry (IFTI; i.e., the general belief that employees are hardworking, productive, and willing to go above and beyond). We also find that when followers hold a high IFTI but feel that their leader does not convey high expectations, their engagement at work suffers. In addition, we examine whether leaders’ IFTI forms the origin of naturally occurring Pygmalion effects. Our results show that a positive IFTI among leaders is especially interpreted as high/positive expectations by followers who also hold a high/positive IFTI. Our study introduces boundary conditions to the Pygmalion-at-work model by revealing the interactive role of leaders’ and followers’ implicit followership theory of industry. We contribute to the advancement of cognitive, follower-centric perspectives on leadership and provide evidence for the importance of schema congruence.

Though considerable research has been conducted on ethical leadership, we still know very little about the antecedents to ethical leadership perceptions. Drawing primarily from social learning theory, we propose a process model by which leader Machiavellianism affects ethical leadership, which is then hypothesized to influence psychological empowerment. In addition, we propose that team member role performance and organization-directed organizational citizenship behavior will be consequences of psychological empowerment. Drawing from a sample of 242 employees reporting to 82 leaders, our findings broadly demonstrate support for our hypotheses and advance our understanding of both antecedents and outcomes of ethical leadership. We discuss the theoretical implications of our findings, along with the practical insights, limitations, and future research opportunities.

This study extends our understanding of humble leadership as an important trust-engendering leadership style that influences employee behaviors. Drawing on social exchange theory, we articulate how humble leaders’ employee-centric behaviors signal trust and facilitate a social exchange relationship between leaders and followers. Specifically, we posit that a leader’s humble leadership behaviors are positively related to employees’ task performance and organizational citizenship behavior via feelings of being trusted by one’s supervisor. We also predict that the interaction between humble leadership and employee job autonomy will influence employees’ appraisal of feeling trusted. We tested our moderated-mediation model using experimental vignette data and three-wave survey data collected from 233 employees and their supervisors working at a large Chinese internet company. Study results support our hypotheses that humble leadership, and its interaction with employee job autonomy, contribute to feeling trusted by their supervisor. Furthermore, we found that humble leadership behavior, via enhanced perceptions of feeling trusted, predicted supervisor-rated employee task performance and organizational citizenship behavior toward the organization. The implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Scholars and practitioners have offered anecdotal evidence that firms led by female chief executive officers (CEOs) fare better during global recession, perhaps because they take fewer risks. In contrast to commonly held stereotypes that women are more risk averse than men, neither systemic theorizing nor empirical findings support that this popular assumption holds among top organizational leadership. Rather than seeking absolute gender differences in risk aversion, we take a more nuanced approach, considering executive job demands and decision orientation theories to examine underlying psychological mechanisms and economic boundary conditions to gender differences in strategic risk-taking. We test our hypotheses using multiple methods and samples, including an archival study of Fortune 1,000 firms and a survey of CEOs. Our results challenge absolute assumptions of gender risk preferences; rather, we find that female CEOs are less likely to choose risky strategies in a high job demands environment (e.g., economic downturn) due to underlying gender differences in other-orientation.

Drawing on social identity theory and the conservation of resources theory, this study proposes a research framework to reconcile the arguments in previous findings regarding how paternalistic leadership affects team performance. Data from team workers with a variety of professional expertise and skills across 66 high-tech teams in Taiwan were analyzed. The empirical results of this study demonstrate authoritarianism as a double-edged sword for team performance in which authoritarianism positively relates to team performance through team identification but negatively relates to team performance through emotional exhaustion. At the same time, morality positively relates to team performance through team identification, whereas benevolence positively relates to team performance through emotional exhaustion. Based on the findings, theoretical implications, managerial implications, and research limitations are discussed.

Despite the continuous increase in empirical research on leader humor, the important issue of how and when leader humor affects employees’ interpersonal, proactive behaviors in the form of upward voice has largely been overlooked. Drawing on relational process model of humor and data from one multiwave, multisource field study and one experimental field study, we find that the positive effects of leader humor on upward voice behavior can be accounted for by both supervisor–subordinate nonwork ties (i.e., supervisor–subordinate guanxi) and supervisor–subordinate work ties (i.e., leader–member exchange). The indirect effects of both supervisor–subordinate guanxi and leader–member exchange on the relationship between leader humor and upward voice behavior are stronger when employees score low on traditionality. These results shed light on the role of leader humor in promoting the bottom–up flow of potentially critical information in organizations through high-quality relationships with followers and provide insights into who will benefit more from humor in leadership.

This study examines how, why and when relative leader–member exchange (RLMX) influences absenteeism through the mediating effect of feelings of vigor, and the moderating role of unit-level leader–member exchange differentiation (LMX differentiation). Data collected from a Swiss retailer sample of 486 employees within 52 stores shows that RLMX is positively related to feelings of vigor, whereas feelings of vigor are negatively related to absenteeism. Also, RLMX has a stronger positive effect on vigor when LMX differentiation in the unit is high, and on absenteeism when differentiation in the unit is low. However, we found no evidence that the indirect influence of RLMX on absenteeism through feelings of vigor is moderated by unit-level LMX differentiation. The implications of these findings for research on LMX are discussed.