Whereas a plethora of research investigated subordinates who accept their leaders’ influence attempts (i.e., those who follow), we focus here on the reversed perspective, namely subordinates who decide not to follow their leaders’ requests. For example, a subordinate may intentionally lower their effort, regularly pass-off work tasks to colleagues, or take the leader for a fool. The purpose of the

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When treatment cannot be manipulated, propensity score analysis provides a useful way to making causal claims under the assumption of no unobserved confounders. However, it is still rarely utilised in leadership and applied psychology research. The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, it explains and discusses the application and key assumptions of the method with a particular focus on propensity

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Major events in the private lives of CEOs have been a source of fascination for decades. However, despite gaining traction, studies on the relevant phenomena (e.g., marriage, divorce, parenthood, illness) remain scattered in parallel across disciplines. We thematically review the interdisciplinary evidence on the fast-emerging literature on CEO private life events (72 unique studies) to consolidate

For scientific discoveries to be valid—whether in theory or empirically—a phenomenon must be accurately described: The scientist must use appropriate counterfactuals and eliminate competing explanations. Empirical work must also use an appropriate design and method, and empirical claims made about the phenomenon must be correctly characterized. Moreover, valid empirical discoveries must be reliable

Often phenomena that important to understand and predict are very rare. Rare events can prove difficult to analyze systematically because they do not generate many sampling observations. In this article I examine how small sample sizes can be studied scientifically. The article begins with an explanation of the distinction between research and science. I then bring to the fore the importance of counterfactual

Researchers striving to ensure rigor in their scientific findings face a common pitfall: Endogeneity. To tackle this problem, scholars have increasingly adopted instrumental variables estimation (IVE). Although there are many published works showing how IVE should be used, many applied researchers still have trouble understanding how to use the method correctly. In this article, we provide a methodological

Using comprehensive data on 28 cohorts in Sweden, we analyze CEO health and its determinants and outcomes. We find CEOs are in much better health than the population and on par with other high-skill professionals. These results apply in particular to mental health and to CEOs of larger companies. We explore three mechanisms that can account for CEOs’ robust health. First, we find health predicts appointment

Despite the significant amount of existing research examining the relationship of follower-related factors with leadership outcomes, there is no systematic, critical review that integrates and helps leadership scholars make sense of this rapidly growing body of research. To address this gap in the literature, we first briefly discuss the leading perspectives explaining the role of followers in leadership

Humility is a concept grounded in a self-view that something greater than oneself exists. A multitude of disciplines to date have sought to understand how humility impacts leaders, as well as the individuals, teams, and organizations they lead. Despite overlapping research questions, methodologies, and empirical contexts, studies examining leader humility have developed largely in isolation with little

We examine the extent to which CEO facial characteristics matter in media coverage of firms implicated in corporate wrongdoing. We build on literature discussing that leaders’ faces may convey subjective behavioral expectations and that outsiders often over-rely on facial cues when making social judgments. We situate these insights in the context of corporate wrongdoing, where information incompleteness

To advance ethical leadership using signaling theory, the current work presents a mixture of inductive and deductive studies. Using a constant comparative analysis method, Study 1 involved coding CEO letters to shareholders (n = 10,919 sentences). Eight verbal ethical leader signals (ELSs) emerged and were associated with emotions (e.g., righteous anger, pride). In a set of preregistered experiments

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An organizational crisis is a low-probability, high-impact event that threatens the survival of organizations and individuals, often with little warning. In response, people seek clarity, reassurance, and hope from organizational leaders. Yet, crises also vary in nature and impact (e.g., a product failure versus the COVID-19 pandemic), which presents diverse challenges to leaders and differing stakeholder

For several decades, the boards of directors have been relatively homogeneous groups consisting of white old men (the so-called ‘good-old boys’). This static and apparently immutable feature has been changed recently, as social movements and the evolution of corporate law and good governance codes promoted an increasing diversity in the boardroom. In parallel with the diffusion of more diverse boards

Adopting a cognitive and follower-centric approach to charismatic leadership, we hypothesized that followers show lower levels of cognitive effort, reflected in superficial processing of factually correct information when listening to and viewing a charismatic leader. We conducted two experiments, using a 2 (charismatic versus neutral) × 2 (female versus male leader) between-subjects design and videos

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We conducted a field experiment to analyze if there is a glass ceiling for ethnic minorities entering leadership positions in organizations. We submitted over 12,000 job applications, to over 4,000 job advertisements, to investigate hiring discrimination against six ethnic groups for leadership positions. Drawing on implicit leadership theory, we argue that ethnic discrimination is particularly pronounced

Illuminating the nature of leadership and followership requires insights into not only how leaders and followers behave, but also the different cognitions that underpin these social relationships. We argue that the roots of leader and follower roles and status asymmetries often lie in basic mental processes such as attention and visual perception. To understand not only how but also why leaders’ and

We argue that CEO political liberalism, or the extent to which CEOs are more liberal rather than conservative, affects firms’ support for LGBT employees. Specifically, compared to conservative CEOs, liberal CEOs will be more likely to support LGBT employees by implementing LGBT-friendly policies. We furthermore posit that the presence of certain internal and external stakeholders—including boards,

This paper investigates whether foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows are higher in countries ruled by trustworthy-looking or competent-looking leaders. After collecting pictures of 276 nondemocratic leaders in office between 1975 and 2010, we use a computer-based survey to assess how these faces are spontaneously perceived by ordinary people for trustworthiness and competence. We perform regression

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Leadership as a social influence process has always involved a complex set of phenomena that demands an interdisciplinary lens. Leadership scholarship has now entered into a digital era. In a digital era, the overall phenomenon is changing, as are the tools through which we study it, demanding a new “lens” through which we view leadership. Yet, this raises the question, to what extent is leadership

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Despite a tremendous amount of research on the topic, we still have little evidence regarding the extent to which transformational leader behaviors (TLBs) cause a number of outcomes. The primary inhibitors include a lack of theoretical precision, the conflation of leader (follower) behaviors with evaluations, as well as measurement and design issues which prevent causal inferences. To address such

This research is a pre-registered replication of Rosette, Leonardelli, and Phillips' (2008) seminal work in leadership categorization theory. Their work established race as a component to the business leader prototype and found evidence that when a leader was given credit for successful organizational performance, White leaders were evaluated more favorably than non-White leaders. As leadership exemplars

Remote and gig work is prevalent in today’s labor market and calls for skilled digital leaders. Signaling charisma using charismatic-leadership-tactics (CLTs) to increase follower performance works in face-to-face communication. However, technology-mediated communication reduces the signaling opportunities, thereby calling the effectiveness of charismatic signaling into question. In Study 1, I conducted

Leaders often need to project themselves into alternative situations, but there is a limited understanding of how, why, or when leader self-projection might influence their teams’ outcomes. Based on the notion that brain activity in the default mode network (DMN) underlies self-projection, such as future-oriented mental simulations, we argue that the effect of leaders’ DMN activity on team behavior

In March 2020, the COVID-19 virus turned into a pandemic that hit organizations globally. This pandemic qualifies as an exogenous shock. Based on the threat-rigidity hypothesis, we hypothesize that this shock led to an increase in directive leadership behavior. We also argue that this relationship depends on the magnitude of the crisis and on well-learned responses of managers. In our empirical analysis

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This article develops a dual-agency model of leadership which treats collective phenomena as a co-production involving both leaders and followers who identify with the same social group. The model integrates work on identity leadership and engaged followership derived from the social identity approach in social psychology. In contrast to binary models which view either leaders or followers as having

Cognition is a central element of organizational behavior and leaders are seen as key shapers of organizational cognition. Leaders’ influence over organizations often occurs through their influence on the collectives or teams they are leading. Hence, leaders influence organizational outcomes by modeling team cognition. Despite the importance of this relationship for organizational outcomes, there is

Blending conceptual framing from the CEO-TMT interface literature with upper echelons decision-making theory, we develop a model of the role of CEO narcissism and narcissism in the upper echelons. We argue that narcissistic CEOs tend to have higher narcissism in their Top Management Teams (N-TMTs). In turn, TMTs characterized by narcissism can benefit from positive aspects of narcissism while avoiding

Research exploring the powerful links between leadership and identity has burgeoned in recent years but cohered around two distinct approaches. Research on identity leadership, the main focus of this special issue, sees leadership as a group process that centers on leaders’ ability to represent, advance, create and embed a social identity that they share with the collectives they lead—a sense of “us

Scholars have investigated the emergence of charismatic leaders in times of crisis. However, results from this research are usually descriptive, suffer from endogeneity bias, or rely on inappropriate causal modeling. Building on exogenous events, we explore the causal effect of crises on charismatic rhetoric and approval ratings of political leaders using regression discontinuity designs. In a reanalysis

This special issue was developed to extend the boundaries of strategic leadership research, to help bridge the micro-macro divide regarding theories of strategic leadership, and to bring together theories that have emerged independently. In this introductory editorial, we provide an overview of the research on strategic leadership and emphasize the need for further integration of research from the

This article presents results from two complementary experiments that examine the effects of a potential obstacle to female leadership: gendered language in the form of masculine leadership titles. In the first experiment (N = 1753), we utilize an unobtrusive writing task to find that a masculine title (“Chairman” vs. “Chair”) increases assumptions that a hypothetical leader is a man, even when the

Why do people support strong leaders? We examined the link between social identity continuity – the sense that a nation’s past, present, and future are interconnected – and the wish for a strong national leader. Drawing on a multi-country data set (Study 1: N = 6112) and a sample from Australia (Study 2: N = 621), Studies 1 and 2 showed that identity continuity was related to increased desire for a

What makes followers act collectively when called upon by their leaders? To answer this question, participants were randomly allocated to leader–follower relationships embedded either in a partisan group or a workgroup context; and the relationship between identity leadership and collective action through ingroup identification (Study 1: N = 293) or both ingroup identification and group-efficacy (Study

In an era of rapid advances in artificial intelligence, the deployment of robots in organizations is accelerating. Further, robotic capabilities are expanding to serve a broader range of leadership behaviors related to task accomplishment and relationship support. Despite the increasing use of robots in various roles across different industries, research on human-robot collaboration in the workplace

Congruence has served as an important research framework for many leadership research topics. Perhaps the most frequently used methodological/statistical approach for testing the congruence framework is polynomial regression analysis (PRA) with response surface methodology (RSM). As this approach was introduced to organizational sciences more than two decades ago, we can now identify the main issues

Facial appearance has been associated with leader selection in domains where effective leadership is considered crucial, such as politics, business and the military. Few studies, however, have so far explored associations between facial appearance and entrepreneurship, despite the growing expectation that societies project on entrepreneurs for providing exemplary leadership in activities leading to

We examine the effects of moral (vs. competent) leadership on followers' leader evaluations and endorsement. In Study 1 (N = 157), followers evaluated a leader more negatively and endorsed them less when they failed on morality than competence. An indirect effect from leader morality to leader evaluation, through perceived group prototypicality emerged, demonstrating the identity-basis of this evaluation

A key function of team leadership is building and sustaining shared mental models. Topological approaches to leadership identify structural patterns, such as decentralized and shared leadership that empower members to collectively lead themselves toward important goals, but an open question is the particular form of leadership that best promotes team mental models. We explored 8 leadership archetypes

Over a decade ago, Rosette, Leonardelli, and Phillips (2008) conducted a study on race and business leader prototypes and discovered that participants held an implicit “white leadership standard”. As revealed in that study, such a standard introduces racial bias into the leadership categorization process, and places employees from racial minority groups at a disadvantage as they seek to attain leadership

In this study, we draw from 22 years of research in leadership to investigate the ambiguous relationship between the personality trait agreeableness and leadership. First, we conduct a comprehensive review of the leadership literature to build a foundational understanding of leader agreeableness that includes providing a broad definition for agreeableness, identifying emerging trends, and proposing

This paper provides experimental evidence on how monitoring intensity shapes the impact of leadership instruments like leading-by-example and punishment. The results show that, with low monitoring intensity, neither leading-by-example nor punishment increases cooperation if the leader can already send nonbinding signals about desired behavior. We identify two different reasons for this effect. Regarding

Behaviors can be characterized as “the internally coordinated responses (actions or inactions) of whole living organisms (individuals or groups) to internal and/or external stimuli.” (Levitis et al., 2009). The study of behavior is a critical component of theory advancement in the area of leadership. Yet, a large number of leadership studies conflate behavioral and nonbehavioral concepts. First, our

We draw attention to how and why multiple perspectives on emergence can promote leadership scholarship within the broad umbrella category of emergent leadership. Tracing the derivation of emergent leadership and related concepts since 1941, we identify four empirically derived themes: Entries, or how and where definitions were introduced and adopted; Essences, identification of key components and processes;

The proliferation of digital data has opened the door for a 21st-century social science that explores human relationships on an unprecedented scale. A particular area of interest is that of leader social media (SM) usage. As studies on leader SM usage have grown dramatically in the past several years, we take stock of the extant literature across various research disciplines. Within this manuscript

Previous research has demonstrated that social stereotypes associated with women's gender can preclude them from leadership positions. It remains unclear whether these stereotypes affect how people perceive male and female leaders, however. To examine people's stereotypes, we extracted their mental representations of male and female leaders and typical men/women (referred to as nonleaders) using reverse

This paper leverages technological and methodological advances in natural language processing to advance our understanding and approaches to leadership research by introducing structural topic models (STM) to researchers wanting to inductively code massive amounts of unstructured texts. Specifically, we illustrate the application of STM applied to a large corpus (N ≈ 8000) of unstructured text responses

Research into leadership has consistently associated leaders with follower outcomes, such as motivation, satisfaction, and individual performance. However, only a few studies have looked at the impact of leadership on economic outcomes. In this study we test the effect of leaders’ political ideology (an identifiable leadership preference) on economic outcomes (private and public business creation)

Environment-leader congruency yields better adaptability manifested in better decision-making. The military combat environment offers advantages for leaders with ADHD; though they are expected to encounter difficulties due to executive dysfunction. This research aspired to increase the congruency effect for leaders with ADHD in a stressful military environment through interventions that improve executive

Attractive political candidates receive more votes on Election Day compared to their less attractive competitors. One well-cited theoretical account for this attractiveness effect (White et al., 2013) holds that it reflects an adaptive psychological response to disease threats. Voters are predicted to upregulate preferences for attractiveness because it constitutes a cue to health. The global COVID-19

Extraversion is a consistent predictor of informal leader emergence, however little is known about extraversion’s causal effect in terms of predicting the transition to formal leadership. Using two large household samples from Germany (Study 1, n1 = 6,709) and Australia (Study 2, n2 = 6,056), we test whether trait extraversion predicts the transition of employed persons into formal leadership positions

Over half of British Members of Parliament (MPs) were found to have overclaimed on their expenses in the 2009 expenses scandal. We conducted an exploratory analysis of whether the facial appearance of the MPs (N = 636) is associated with overclaiming, as research has found that facial appearance is correlated with behavioural outcomes. Participants (N = 4,727) previously unfamiliar with the MPs made

Leadership selection often requires candidates to actively choose to express their interest. Using a series of incentivized experiments with more than 1000 participants, we compare such an Opt-in mechanism with an Opt-out mechanism where everyone qualified for the position is in the candidate pool by default, but individuals can choose to opt out of the selection process. The results reveal a gender