Does thinking of myself as leader make me want to lead? The role of congruence in self-theories and implicit leadership theories in motivation to lead

Abstract

The paper focuses on antecedents of leadership self-efficacy and motivation to lead. We propose that the congruence between how individuals see leaders in general (implicit leadership theories) and how they see themselves (implicit self-theories) on different characteristics, is related to leadership self-efficacy and indirectly to motivation to lead. We surveyed 497 individuals at two time points. For two dimensions of implicit theories, (dynamism and integrity), we found that congruence at a high level is important for leadership self-efficacy. For the dimensions of clever, dynamism, and integrity, we found that leadership self-efficacy was higher when individuals thought that they were higher on these characteristics than leaders in general. For manipulation, neither congruence nor incongruence was related to leadership self-efficacy. Our results further suggest that leadership self-efficacy mediates the significant direct effects of congruence in implicit leadership theories/implicit self-theories and motivation to lead. Our results demonstrate the importance of understanding the congruence or incongruence of views about leaders in general and the self, and highlight the importance of taking into account the different dimensions of implicit leadership theories/implicit self-theories to be better able to predict motivation to lead.