Abstract
This study investigated the reasons that leaders have given for their leader role occupancy. By using a mixed-method approach and large leader data, we aimed to provide a more nuanced picture of how leader positions are occupied in real life. We examined how individual leadership motivation may associate with other reasons for leader role occupancy. In addition, we aimed to integrate the different reasons behind leader role occupancy into the framework of sustainable leader careers and its two indicators: leader’s health (occupational well-being) and performance (measured indirectly as followers’ occupational well-being). The survey data consisted of 1,031 leaders from various sectors of working life. Qualitative analysis revealed that leaders mention various factors behind their leader role occupancy, resulting 26 themes. After inductive investigation of the data, theory-driven analysis focused on the sustainable career components (person, context, time) and agency vs. non-agency. Qualitative data was quantitized based on the theory-driven categories for statistical analysis. Based on the these analysis, we found out that only Affective-Identity MTL predicted all of the studied reasons behind leader role occupancy, whereas the other motivation types (Non-calculative MTL and Social-Normative MTL) did not. All of the reasons for leader role occupancy except non-agentic ones were related to both leaders’ own and their followers’ occupational well-being. Leaders with more person-related and agentic reasons for leader role occupancy experienced better occupational well-being. Person- and context-related and agentic reasons behind leader role occupancy associated also with followers’ occupational well-being, but the associations differed from those of leaders’ well-being: person-related and agentic reasons associated with followers’ exhaustion, but this association was not found among leaders. Our study provided important information for practitioners in the field of human resources and development, as it has shown that if the reasons for leader role occupancy mainly reflect circumstances or other non-person-related reasons, the experienced occupational well-being and person-career fit may remain weak. It is necessary to try to support the leadership motivation for those leaders, or to shape the job description in such a way that it can also offer the experiences of meaningfulness from aspects other than self-realization through a managerial role.
Highlights
Despite the long research tradition on leadership, empirical and scientific research has not led to a conclusive understanding of how leadership emergence takes place among individuals who are acting in complex environments, such as employees and managers working in different organizations
The original themes that were recognized in the open-ended question responses were placed in a 3 × 2 matrix (Figure 1), which was based on the sustainable career components in relation to personal agency
We wanted to explore the variety of reasons that leaders would mention when asked to name the factors behind their leader role occupancy
Summary
Despite the long research tradition on leadership, empirical and scientific research has not led to a conclusive understanding of how leadership emergence takes place among individuals who are acting in complex environments, such as employees and managers working in different organizations. Most of the research on leadership emergence is based on artificial, situation- and participant-specific group simulations, especially leaderless group discussions (e.g., Ensari et al, 2011). For a thorough exploration of who emerges as a leader, other techniques or perspectives in addition to leaderless group discussions are needed. The process perspective of leader emergence deserves more attention than it has previously been given. The studies conducted so far have treated concepts of leadership emergence and leader role occupancy either as a predictor or as an outcome variable (Tuncdogan et al, 2017; Zaccaro et al, 2018). It is clear that approaching an emergent, process-like phenomenon (the question of who will eventually occupy a leader position) by reducing it to a single factor or one end result is likely to lead to the omission of relevant aspects. In addition to understanding the process of leader emergence more systematically, it is important to investigate how the leader emergence process associates with leader careers, and how these careers unfold
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