Approaching Leadership With a Follower Focus

Abstract

This introduction provides an overview of the special issue of Zeitschrift fur Psychologie on ‘‘Followercentric Approaches to Leadership.’’ The purposes of the special issue were to highlight new research on followers’ needs, motivations, and attributions as critical aspects of the leadership relationship. In addition, we hope to have brought together a set of papers that represent new potential directions in research that stem from the examination of followers and followership. Many of the empirical findings and theoretical contributions in this special issue suggest that, just as not all leaders are the same, followers vary (sometimes dramatically) in their needs for certain types of leaders and leadership. In addition, followers differ in their susceptibility and responsiveness to certain types of leadership (e.g., adverse, charismatic, transformational, directive vs. supportive). Over the past several decades, scholars have focused increased attention on followers and followership as a critical component of the leadership relationship. Anyone interested in leadership has likely considered the role of followers, whether active or passive, as fundamental to our understanding of the development, impact, and maintenance of leadership processes. A followercentric approach to leadership highlights new questions and new approaches. For example, how do individual characteristics and qualities of followers influence the development of leaders? What roles do followers’ needs, values, wants, and preferences play in their tolerance or affinity for certain leadership styles? What types of leadership help in developing effective followership, and what types of followership help in developing effective leadership? These questions, among others, are the focus of this special issue. This special issue therefore has a dual purpose. First, we wanted to highlight what types of research questions emerge from a followercentric approach. To this end, we sought empirical studies that considered: (1) followers’ characteristics and potential biases that influence attributions of leadership, including attributions for organizational success and failure and the ‘‘romance of leadership’’ (Meindl, 1995); (2) the role of follower characteristics, perceptions, and motivations in interpreting leadership ratings, as well as the potential impact of situational factors such as the role of crisis and follower uncertainty or fear on these processes; and (3) the social construction of leadership, including social contagion processes and other interfollower processes that enhance or suppress leadership. Second, we also hoped to include new theories and perspectives on the study of leadership and followership. The vast majority of studies of leadership are cross-sectional comparisons of leadership styles and followers’ perceptions of leaders’ styles; only within the last two decades have scholars begun to study the other side of the proverbial coin, focusing on followers’ styles and the processes of followership. The studies in this special issue examine what it means to ‘‘reverse the lens’’ (Shamir, 2007) in leadership research by studying how followers perceive and enact their own roles in the co-production of leadership.