Bastardoz Nicolas, Adriaensen Sofie
Department of Work and Organization Studies, Faculty of Economics and Business, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
Front Psychol. 2023 Sep 22;14:1072800. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1072800. eCollection 2023.
What does it mean to follow? In this paper, we systematically review the followership literature for the period 2017-2021. Our review shows that the followership literature suffers from three major issues that limit its validity. The followership field is dominated by a role-based approach equating direct reports with followers; empirical studies fail to study actual following behaviors, and there are no studies of downward following, which we define as any behavior or effort aimed at achieving a shared goal, carried out by an individual in a position of formal power who is influenced by one or more individuals in a position of inferior authority. Our manuscript builds on the process approach to study what it means to follow. We argue that the followership field needs to study actual followership behaviors at the micro "interaction episodes" and rely on quantitative behavioral coding. We then propose a conceptual, multi-level model that details antecedents and boundary conditions of the emergence of downward following. We conclude by discussing the organizational implications of our approach and model.
“追随”是什么意思？在本文中，我们系统回顾了2017年至2021年期间的追随文献。我们的回顾表明，追随文献存在三个主要问题，这些问题限制了其有效性。追随领域以基于角色的方法为主导，将直接下属等同于追随者；实证研究未能研究实际的追随行为，并且没有关于向下追随的研究，我们将向下追随定义为处于正式权力地位的个人受到一个或多个处于较低权威地位的个人影响而旨在实现共同目标的任何行为或努力。我们的手稿基于过程方法来研究追随的含义。我们认为，追随领域需要在微观的“互动事件”层面研究实际的追随行为，并依赖定量行为编码。然后，我们提出了一个概念性的多层次模型，详细阐述了向下追随出现的前因和边界条件。我们通过讨论我们的方法和模型对组织的影响来得出结论。
