Abstract:

As empowerment was found to enhance followers’ work motivation, and to allow them to be more adaptive to the rapid changing environment, the role of leadership in empowering followers has received increasing attentions in organizational research and practice. Leadership empowerment behavior refers to a set of actions in which a leader shares power to his or her followers through highlighting the meaningfulness of work, fostering participation in decision making, conveying confidence in high performance, and providing autonomy from bureaucratic constraints. While previous research on this topic extols the positive effects resulting from leader empowerment behavior, it remains unclear what factor can predict the emergence of leader empowerment behavior. In recent years, the implicit followership theory, which comes from the combination of social cognitive theory and followership literature, draws a new perspective to investigate the antecedents of leadership empowerment behavior. According to the implicit followership theory, individuals generate personal assumptions about the traits that characterize followers. Integral elements of implicit followership theory are prototypes, which are abstract, composite mental representations for particular cognitive categories. Based on the valence of a prototype, followership prototypes are classified into two types: the positive followership prototype (PFP) and the negative followership prototype. PFP comprises the assumed traits characterizing good followers, such as industriousness, enthusiasm and good citizenship. To date, many scholars focused on leaders’ PFP and found that leaders’ PFP affected followers’ job attitude and performance through leader-member exchange. In compliance with the research approach for positive psychology, we also plan to concentrate on leaders’ PFP. In organizational settings, leaders' PFP may be activated unconsciously and compared with the followers' explicit/actual followership characteristics in the leader-follower interaction. Leaders act in accordance with the outcome of these comparisons. Drawing on such arguements, we aim to explore the effect of the congruence between leader’s PFP and follower’s positive followership trait (PFT) on leader empowerment behavior. Polynomial regression combined with the response surface methodology was used to test the hypotheses. Based on a sample of 226 leader-follower dyads from two companies in China, we showed that: (1) The more agreement (i.e., higher congruence) between a leader’s PFP and follower’s PFT, the higher the leader empowerment behavior; (2) In the cases of congruence, leadership empowerment behavior was higher when leader PFP and follower PFT were both high instead of being both low. There are still some shortcomings in this paper. First, the study probes only into the direct impact of followership prototype congruence on leadership empowerment behavior, whereas the underlying mechanism and its boundary conditions are not discussed. We suggest the mediating role of trust in followers and moderating role of leadership prototype agreement can be examined in future studies. In addition, we explain the relationship between the independent variable and dependent variable in detail, adopting the method of multi-source data to avoid common method variance, but the cross-sectional study design constrains our findings about causality. Thus, future research can take advantage of a longitudinal study design or experimental design to test the effect of implicit-explicit followership congruence on leader empowerment behavior.

摘要：

本文基于内隐追随理论，探讨了领导者的积极追随原型与追随者的积极追随特质的匹配情形如何形塑领导者的授权行为。基于广东省2家食品企业的226份上下级配对数据，采用多项式回归和响应面分析技术发现：当追随者的积极追随特质与领导者的积极追随原型相匹配时，追随者能够成为领导者的“意中人”。面对“意中人”，领导者将展现更多的授权行为。在匹配情况下，高—高匹配时的领导者授权行为高于低—低匹配的情形。