Full length articleWhen subordinates do not follow: A typology of subordinate resistance as perceived by leaders
Section snippets
Theoretical background
Speaking to the notion that subordinates actively shape leadership (Oc et al., 2023), investigating a leader’s perception of subordinate resistance is one puzzle piece to understanding how subordinates’ non-following can influence how leadership can take place. This is because the leaders’ mental representation and perception of subordinates’ behaviors drive leadership outcomes. In this regard, research showed that how leaders perceive their subordinates’ actions impact their decision-making
Topic modeling
In Study 1, we applied topic modeling to identify facets of subordinate resistance. Topic modeling enables a “bottom-up” inductive analysis of qualitative data based on an unsupervised machine learning algorithm that carves out clusters of words that co-occur (Banks et al., 2018, Kobayashi et al., 2018, Tonidandel et al., 2021). In contrast to grounded theory approaches that solely relies on human coders, topic modeling represents an automated and data-driven process that paves the way for
Results
Our guiding research question asked how leaders experience subordinate resistance and how these perceived instances of subordinate resistance can be categorized. To preview our findings, the topic modeling provided empirical support for five distinct facets, namely (1) effort minimization, (2) undermining team cohesion, (3) emotionally fluctuating communication, (4) entitlement, and (5) contact-seeking/avoiding. Next, we illustrate the five facets of subordinate resistance in more detail and
Study 2: Prevalence and antecedents of subordinate resistance
We conducted a follow-up study to address the second part of our research question, namely how often leaders experience each of the five identified categories of subordinate resistance in their working life. Furthermore, we wanted to explore how leader-related antecedents (i.e., demographics, cognitive ability, personality) and the situational context (i.e., industry) are associated with the prevalence of subordinate resistance and the leaders’ perceptions of the degree of destructiveness of
General discussion
In this study, we developed a classification of different types of subordinate resistance that leaders perceive in their daily working life. In doing so, we add nuance to the followership literature, which has thus far either focused on followers who follow (Chaleff, 1995, Kelley, 1992, Zaleznik, 1965) or scattered instances of descriptions of subordinate resistance (Güntner et al., 2021, Tepper et al., 2001). Using topic modeling to analyze data obtained through interviews with leaders, we
Funding
There is no specific funding to report for this research.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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