Tavares Gustavo M, Sobral Filipe, Goldszmidt Rafael, Araújo Felipe
Center for Behavioral Research, Brazilian School of Public and Business Administration, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Front Psychol. 2018 Feb 7;9:100. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00100. eCollection 2018.
Although research on implicit leadership theories (ILTs) has concentrated on determining which attributes define a leadership prototype, little attention has been paid to testing the relative importance of each of these attributes for individuals' leadership perceptions. Building on socio-cognitive theories of impression processes, we experimentally explore the formation of leadership perceptions based on the recognition of six key attributes in a series of three experimental studies comprising 566 US-based participants recruited online via Amazon Mechanical Turk. Our results show that while certain attributes play an important role in the leader categorization process, others are less relevant. We also demonstrate that some attributes' importance is contingent on the presence of other attributes and on the leadership schema type activated in respondents' minds. Consistent with the Leadership Categorization Theory, our findings support the premise that individuals cognitively hold a superordinate leadership prototype, which imposes constraints on their more basic level prototypes. We discuss the implications of these results for leadership theory and practice.
尽管对隐性领导理论（ILTs）的研究集中在确定哪些属性定义了领导原型上，但对于测试这些属性中的每一个对个人领导认知的相对重要性却很少有人关注。基于印象形成的社会认知理论，我们通过一系列三项实验研究，对566名通过亚马逊土耳其机器人在线招募的美国参与者进行了实验，探索基于对六个关键属性的识别而形成的领导认知。我们的结果表明，虽然某些属性在领导者分类过程中起着重要作用，但其他属性则不太相关。我们还证明，一些属性的重要性取决于其他属性的存在以及受访者脑海中激活的领导模式类型。与领导分类理论一致，我们的研究结果支持这样一个前提，即个体在认知上持有一个上级领导原型，这对他们更基本层面的原型施加了限制。我们讨论了这些结果对领导理论和实践的启示。
