The Art of Followership: How Great Followers Create Great Leaders and Organizations

Chapter 18. Followers' Cognitive and Affective Structures and Leadership Processes

Robert G. Lord

Contrary to the claims that followers have been ignored, the leadership literature has a long tradition of recognizing the importance of followers. Dyadic relations between leaders and followers have been viewed as a mutual influence process,^[247] with leader behavior reflecting responses to subordinate performance levels as well as the attributions for subordinate performance made by leaders.^[248] The potential of leaders to influence followers also depends on the idiosyncratic credit he or she has earned in followers' eyes^[249] and the extent to which followers see the leader as fitting their image of what good leaders should be.^[250] Some researchers, such as Meindl,^[251] have even argued that leadership is a construction of followers, spawning numerous follower-centered studies of leadership.^[252] Indeed, social psychologists have typically viewed leaders and followers as being engaged in a mutual exchange or transaction, in which both parties benefit and in which both parties are active contributors.^[253] However, as noted by Hollander, the popularity of more recent transformational leadership approaches has tended to overemphasize the leader and underemphasize the follower contribution to this exchange process.^[254] By reemphasizing followers' role in leadership processes, this book makes an important contribution, for particularly with the movement toward flatter administrative ...