Leadership Quarterly最新文献

Cultural and evolutionary explanations are often seen as rivals in the social sciences. It is therefore not surprising that these perspectives have also communicated little in leadership research so far. Yet, these two fields have many overlooked complementarities, which can be appreciated when examining the role of ecological factors in shaping variations in cultural leadership prototypes (CLPs) – that is, societally shared ideal attributes and behaviors that followers expect from their leaders. In this paper, we integrate and review multidisciplinary research that clarifies these complementarities. First, we discuss how different CLPs might emerge as responses to the specific threats and opportunities provided by the ecology where human groups live. Second, we review research on the link between CLPs, related cultural patterns, and specific ecological factors, ranging from more physical (e.g., climate, diseases) to more social factors (e.g., population density, warfare). Third, we highlight how CLPs might not only be evoked by current ecological conditions but are also culturally transmitted, resulting in potential mismatches between CLPs and present ecologies. Our review shows that a deeper integration of cultural and evolutionary approaches to leadership is needed to understand why variations in CLPs can emerge, and why they persist or change over time.

Along with the affective revolution in organizational behavior research, leadership research has also experienced an affective revolution, resulting in a field of research on the intersection of affect and leadership. Based on the results of a review of 162 articles published in eight top-tier management and leadership journals over three decades (1990–2022), I identify a range of topics on the intersection of leadership and affect, and organize them under an integrative cognitive-affective-behavioral-trait (CAB-T) thematic framework. Although the field appears to be flourishing, it may have built on a shaky foundation, because most of the published empirical studies are flawed by critical issues such as endogeneity and poor research design. For example, only 12 out of 127 empirical articles are possibly without endogeneity issues; 3 out of 32 experiments and 2 out of 11 qualitative studies are considered rigorous against specified criteria. Based on the identified limitations, I provide a future research agenda for a robust field of leader affect research.

The deep-level characteristics (e.g., personality, ability, values) of leaders have previously been found to influence key outcomes for followers, organizations, and more. However, many widely used measures of these deep-level characteristics (e.g., self-reported Likert scales) cannot be implemented when studying high-ranking leaders due to a lack of direct access to those types of leaders. In light of this challenge, scholars have developed indirect, unobtrusive measures to capture these deep-level characteristics. In this review, we examine the four overarching approaches prior scholars have used to indirectly measure leaders’ deep-level characteristics—language, visual media, financials, and personal factors—and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. Based on the patterns found, we also suggest avenues for future research.

In this review, we aim to critically evaluate the state of the leadership and networks literature and provide a detailed overview of the various network-based approaches that can be leveraged in leadership research to accomplish three main objectives. First, we introduce an organizing framework that classifies the array of network-based approaches used in addressing leadership questions into two broad categories: descriptive versus predictive network-based approaches. Second, we critically review the leadership literature to assess the degree to which network-based approaches have been employed in leadership investigations, the major topic areas in leadership that have been investigated via a social network lens, and the extent to which network-based approaches have impacted researchers’ abilities to address major empirical challenges in leadership research—namely, the incorporation of multilevel, multisource, contextual, temporal, processual, and causal perspectives of leadership. Finally, we demonstrate the unique capabilities of the network-based approaches by showing how an exemplar topic in leadership investigations—leadership emergence—may be explored from multiple perspectives through the different categories of network-based models. By promoting a better understanding of network-based methodologies and their utilization in leadership research, we pave way for new ways of thinking about and framing leadership research questions.

Complementary evidence from narrative literature reviews and meta-analyses leads to the conclusion that much research suffers from a lack of attention to the context in which leadership occurs. Several possible reasons for this context deficit are refuted, including notions that context is unimportant for leaders, contextualized research is less scientific than decontextualized research, and useful contextual descriptors are lacking. Rather, it is argued that the context deficit is a negative manifestation of the romance of leadership. Advantages of enhanced attention to context include reduction of omitted variable bias, improved understanding of anomalous research results, differentiation and integration of research findings, and enhanced teaching and practice of leadership. Improved contextual appreciation can be facilitated by consulting contextual success stories, embracing an interdisciplinary perspective, focusing on events, behavior, and change, employing experience sampling, conducting more qualitative research, using a configural approach, studying how leaders construe and process contextual cues, adopting context-specific leadership measures, and improving writing, editing, and review practices concerning context.

Using field and laboratory data, we show that leader charisma can affect COVID-related mitigating behaviors. We coded a panel of U.S. governor speeches for charisma signaling using a deep neural network algorithm. The model explains variation in stay-at-home behavior of citizens based on their smart phone data movements, showing a robust effect of charisma signaling: stay-at-home behavior increased irrespective of state-level citizen political ideology or governor party allegiance. Republican governors with a particularly high charisma signaling score impacted the outcome more relative to Democratic governors in comparable conditions. Our results also suggest that one standard deviation higher charisma signaling in governor speeches could potentially have saved 5,350 lives during the study period (02/28/2020–05/14/2020). Next, in an incentivized laboratory experiment we found that politically conservative individuals are particularly prone to believe that their co-citizens will follow governor appeals to distance or stay at home when exposed to a speech that is high in charisma; these beliefs in turn drive their preference to engage in those behaviors. These results suggest that political leaders should consider additional “soft-power” levers like charisma—which can be learned—to complement policy interventions for pandemics or other public heath crises, especially with certain populations who may need a “nudge.”

Causality is essential in informing science and policy. In the present study, we investigate the current state of research regarding causality in the field of servant (and authentic) leadership and provide recommendations on how causally identified studies can be conducted. After explaining the methodological problems that potentially prevent causal inferences (i.e., endogeneity bias and issues in experimental design), we provide two systematic literature reviews of servant and authentic leadership showing that these problems remain very prevalent. We then discuss two solutions on how causal effects of servant leadership or perceptions thereof can be established: randomized experiments and instrumental variable regression. To illustrate our recommendations, we report an experiment on the effect of a combination of two servant leadership dimensions (i.e., stewardship and authenticity) on follower performance and also investigate the effect of combined stewardship and authenticity perceptions using instrumental variable regression. The results do not indicate that combined stewardship and authenticity behavior or perceptions affect follower performance. Our study can serve as a roadmap, especially for servant leadership researchers, to address potential endogeneity and conduct causally identified research.