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The Research Status, Theoretical Explanations, and Future Prospects of Followership
Jia Jianfeng, Cao Ruixia, Liu Weipeng
Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2026, Vol. 49 ›› Issue (2) : 437-450.
PDF(2575 KB)
PDF(2575 KB)
The Research Status, Theoretical Explanations, and Future Prospects of Followership
In the era of rapid technological development, organizations have become increasingly flat, and a purely leadership-centric management model struggles to meet the evolving demands of enterprises in the digital age. The role of followers in organizations has gradually expanded. Followership emerges from the interaction between the followers, leaders, and organizations, which has become a hot topic in the field of organizational management. Especially after 2019, followership literature accounts for 56.86% of the reviewed literature, representing a new development trend in followership research. To further integrate the research findings in this field and clarify its theoretical mechanisms, integrating qualitative and quantitative analysis methods to discuss followership from four aspects: Its concepts and measurements, formation mechanisms, outcomes, and future prospects. Details are as follows:
First, we searched the literature from 2006 to 2025, using both domestic (CNKI, Wanfang, VIP) and international databases (Web of Science Core Collection, EBSCO/Host). Using the PRISMA literature retrieval process, 53 English articles and 49 Chinese articles were selected for analysis. A publication volume graph and a knowledge co-occurrence map of keywords both domestically and internationally were created to illustrate the development stages and research hotspots of followership, determining the analytical framework.
Second, we explored five perspectives to discuss the conceptual connotations of followership, which were trait, ability, behavior, relationship, and process. The dimensions and measurements of followership were discussed from the perspectives of followers, leaders, and situations. As a result, the numerous connotations and measurement methods for followership resulted in the generalization of core concepts and potential inaccuracies in measurement. It was pointed out that future research should further clarify connotations, dimensions, and measurements in the context of digital scenarios.
Third, the perspectives of social construction, social exchange, social identity, and resource base collectively highlight the complexity and multi-faceted nature of followership formation. While prior studies predominantly examined antecedents at a single level, followership emergence is inherently multi-level, driven by the interplay of individual, relational, and contextual factors. There is a need to further integrate factors from multiple levels and analyze the triggering mechanisms of followership from the perspective of factor combinations. Due to the lack of a systematic theoretical perspective on the consequences of followership, its effects were analyzed from the levels of individual employee, leader, and team. It was found that existing research mostly focused on the positive effects of followership on individuals, leaders, and teams, while followership may lead to negative behaviors, shape negative leadership styles, and reduce organizational innovation capabilities. A more objective view of the consequences of followership is needed. The boundary mechanisms that affect the stimulation and function of followership were analyzed from the levels of individual employees and organizational situations. It was found that existing studies focus only on the different degrees of followership performance in traditional scenarios. The digital scenario as an organizational scenario has not received much attention. Further attention is needed to the enhancement and weakening of the degree of followership triggering and outcome effects due to factors such as individual digital cognition of employees in digital situations.
Finally, based on the above analysis, a systematic theoretical framework was constructed. The future research should further explore the manifestations and specific characteristics of followership in the digital era, developing a precise definition, connotations, and measurement scales. Analytical methods such as Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) configurations should be used to analyze the triggering mechanisms of followership from different factor combinations. Attention should be paid to the dark side of following behavior, combined with its positive effects, to enhance an objective understanding of its consequences. New organizational situations should be considered, breaking original assumptions, and analyzing the boundary conditions of related factors to enhance the triggering and outcome effects of followership in digital situations.
followership / formation mechanism / consequence / bibliometrics
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| [63] |
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| [64] |
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of followership dimensions in the transformational leadership process by reversing the lens from the traditional leader-centric perspective to emerging followership perspective and examine the role of trust as a mediating variable in the proposed relationship.
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| [65] |
Based on data drawn from the Office of Personnel Management’s Federal Human Capital Survey, as well as from data provided in written interviews, this study offers empirical evidence that followership mediates the relationship that exists between participative leadership and public organization performance.
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| [66] |
This study examined the impact of superiors’ ethical leadership on subordinates’ unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB) and the mediating effects of followership. The research subjects were officials from the ten central departments of the South Korean government, and a cross-sectional survey was conducted among them. Overall, 404 questionnaires were used in the empirical analysis. Multiple regression analysis and Hayes Process Macro were used to validate the research hypotheses, which examined the relationship among ethical leadership, followership, and UPB. The results are as follows: First, the relationship between ethical leadership and followership was statistically significant. Second, the study showed that followership had a statistically significant effect on UPB but not ethical leadership. Third, testing the hypotheses regarding the mediating effect of followership on the relationship between ethical leadership and UPB revealed statistically significant results. This study confirms that followership significantly influences UPB and suggests that ethical leadership is an important precedent factor of followership. The study concludes with the theoretical and practical implications of these findings, along with the study’s limitations.
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| [67] |
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| [68] |
Authentic leadership occurs when individuals enact their true selves in their role as a leader. This article examines the role of authentic followership in the previously established relationship between authentic leadership and follower in-role and extrarole performance behaviors. Consideration of followers who enact their true selves is important to understand how authentic leadership fosters follower self-determined work motivation and thus work role performance. Using self-determination theory (SDT) as a guiding framework, the authors propose that authentic leadership, authentic followership, and their interplay are positively related to the satisfaction of followers’ basic needs, which, in turn, are positively related to follower work role performance. The authors conducted a survey study of 30 leaders and 252 followers in 25 Belgian service companies. The results provide evidence of positive relationship for both authentic leadership and authentic followership with follower basic need satisfaction in a cross-level model where authentic leadership was aggregated to the group level of analysis. Cross-level interaction results indicated that authentic leadership strengthened the relationship between authentic followership and follower basic need satisfaction. Follower basic need satisfaction was shown to mediate the relationship of authentic leadership and authentic followership with follower work role performance. A test of mediated moderation further demonstrated that basic need satisfaction mediates the interaction of authentic leadership and authentic followership on follower work role performance. The implications for leadership research and practice are explored.
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| [69] |
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| [70] |
The purpose of this study is to examine how construction project managers’ conflict management styles (CMSs) affect project team resilience from the perspective of social identity theory.
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| [71] |
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| [72] |
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| [73] |
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| [74] |
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| [75] |
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| [76] |
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| [77] |
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| [78] |
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| [79] |
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| [80] |
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| [81] |
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| [82] |
Drawing upon evolutionary logic, leadership is reconceptualized in terms of the outcome of strategic interactions among individuals who are following different, yet complementary, decision rules to solve recurrent coordination problems. This article uses the vast psychological literature on leadership as a database to test several evolutionary hypotheses about the origins of leadership and followership in humans. As expected, leadership correlates with initiative taking, trait measures of intelligence, specific task competencies, and several indicators of generosity. The review finds no link between leadership and dominance. The evolutionary analysis accounts for reliable age, health, and sex differences in leadership emergence. In general, evolutionary theory provides a useful, integrative framework for studying leader-follower relationships and generates various novel research hypotheses.
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| [83] |
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| [84] |
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| [85] |
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| [86] |
The existing research rarely explains the value of authoritarian leadership in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The purpose of this study is to explore how authoritarian leadership facilitates employee followership behaviors of the SMEs in China by considering the moderating effects of cooperative goal interdependence and leader behavioral integrity.
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| [87] |
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| [88] |
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| [89] |
The relationship between team temporal leadership and performance has attracted the attention of both academics and practitioners. Theories and studies of team temporal leadership have generally focused on Western teams, and there is a noticeable dearth of empirical verifications focusing on Taiwanese sales marketing teams and the relationship between team temporal leadership and performance in Taiwanese pharmaceutical companies. However, Taiwan has a unique pharmaceutical sales marketing model involving diversified competency, apprenticeship, teamwork, and time management. Thus, this study examined the relationship among team temporal leadership, competency, followership, and performance using linear structured equation modeling. Results from the 360 leader–employee dyads of the sales marketing team revealed that team temporal leadership, competency, and followership are positively related to performance and that team temporal leadership is positively related to competency and followership. According to the results of the research, suggestions for future-related studies are proposed.
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| [90] |
Followership is as crucial as leadership for organizational success. Significant efforts have been made by numerous researchers to examine how leadership influences followership; however, not enough attention has been paid to the influence of internal factors of followers on followership from the followers’ perspective. This study relies on identity theory to understand the relationship between the influence of followers’ perceived self-following traits (FTP) and followership prototype (FP) on followership, and the mediation role of self-efficacy in the relationship between FTP-FP consistency and followership. In order to avoid common method bias and ensure good discriminant validity of the variables, a two-wave time-lagged data collection design was used to collect 276 valid questionnaires from front-line business staff and junior supervisors in private and public sector organizations of China. Polynomial regression and response surface analysis were used to investigate the effect of FTP-FP consistency on followership. The empirical findings indicated that (1) the more consistent FTP-FP, the stronger the followership; (2) compared to the ‘low FTP-low FP’, employees with ‘high FTP-high FP’ had stronger followership; (3) employees with ‘high FTP-low FP’ had stronger followership than ‘low FTP-high FP’; (4) self-efficacy played a mediating role between FTP-FP consistency and followership. These findings contribute to management practice by revealing antecedents to followership from the perspective follower identity and the effect of follower identity on followership.
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| [91] |
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| [92] |
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