Abstract
Research on the relationship of implicit motives and effective leadership emphasises the importance of a socialised need for power, whereas high levels of the need for affiliation are assumed to thwart a leader’s success. In our study, we experimentally analysed the impact of leaders’ socialised need for power and their need for affiliation on perceptions of transformational leadership and various success indicators. Using paper-people vignettes, we contrasted leaders characterised by either motive with those concerned with personalised power or achievement. Results based on N = 80 employees show that leaders high in socialised power were rated more successful and elicited more identification and organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB) in followers, and that in most cases this effect was mediated by perceptions of transformational leadership. For all outcomes but OCB, findings remained unchanged when affiliation-motivated leaders were considered. Exploratory analyses contrasting socialised power-motivated and affiliation-motivated leaders show that with regard to attitudinal outcomes affiliation-motivated leaders were, on average, as effective as socialised power-motivated ones.
Highlights
Personality is among the longest studied antecedents of leadership emergence and effectiveness (Yukl 2012)
Scholars have been concerned with the implicit need for power
We pursue three purposes in promoting the importance of need for affiliation (nAff): First, we aim to show that like leaders concerned with a socialised use of power, affiliation-motivated leaders are perceived to more engage in effective leadership behaviours than those striving for personal gains or exceptional accomplishments
Summary
Personality is among the longest studied antecedents of leadership emergence and effectiveness (Yukl 2012). We first refer to leaders concerned with a responsible use of power whose success has widely been evidenced, and compare them with leaders characterised by less effective motive dispositions. Using this benchmark, we contrast affiliation-motivated leaders with the latter ones. We pursue three purposes in promoting the importance of nAff: First, we aim to show that like leaders concerned with a socialised use of power, affiliation-motivated leaders are perceived to more engage in effective leadership behaviours than those striving for personal gains or exceptional accomplishments. We relate implicit motives to transformational leadership, the most popular leadership paradigm (Dinh et al 2014)
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