Department of Management
Date of this Version
6-2014
Document Type
Article
Citation
Published in Industrial and Organizational Psychology 7:2 (June 2014), pp. 187–191; doi: 10.1111/iops.12130
Abstract
On the whole, we embrace the wisdom of Lord and Dinh’s suggestion that leadership researchers need to refocus our attention on the distinction between leadership perception and effectiveness. That said, we hope that the field can move one step further by recognizing the need to treat perceptual biases as more than systematic errors to be controlled for. As encoded in Lord and Dinh’s first two principles, followers are active participants in the construction of leadership phenomena, so the perceptual “baggage” that they bring into the leader–follower system is an important building block in that construction. We believe that by accounting for perceiver effects in leadership research we can not only help disentangle leadership perception from effectiveness but also open up new opportunities to explore how perceptions may drive effectiveness. In addition, we believe that a better understanding of follower perceptions can facilitate more effective management by allowing practicing managers to make sense of the idiosyncratic reactions followers may display in response to the decisions and behaviors of their leaders.
Included in
Business Administration, Management, and Operations Commons, Human Resources Management Commons, Organizational Behavior and Theory Commons
Comments
Copyright © 2014 Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. Published by John Wiley & Sons.