The role of focal leaders in collective leadership behavior: A historiometric analysis of socialized and personalized leaders

Abstract

The increasing adoption of collectivistic leadership approaches in organizations has sparked a growing interest in understanding factors influencing their emergence and effectiveness. In their collective leadership framework, Friedrich, Vessey, Schuelke, Ruark, and Mumford (2009) underscore the pivotal role of focal leaders in sharing aspects of the leadership role and facilitating conditions for the emergence of informal leadership. Despite the imperative of power sharing in this process, no study to date has explored the relationship between power orientation and collective leadership behaviors. To address this gap, we conducted a historiometric leader analysis to compare collective leadership behavior between focal leaders with socialized and personalized orientations. Furthermore, there is a pressing need for additional empirical work investigating the relationships between collective leadership behaviors and outcomes, especially among leaders with different power orientations. Consequently, we conducted a series of correlations for each leader type to gain insight into these relationships. Our results indicate that personalized leaders exhibit less engagement in collective leadership behaviors compared to socialized leaders, and these behaviors successfully discriminate between the two power orientations. Additionally, we observed that personalized leaders who demonstrated greater engagement in collective leadership behaviors achieved more positive and fewer negative outcomes. Implications of these findings are discussed.