The emergence of implicit leadership theories in children: An empirical study

Abstract

Implicit leadership theories (ILTs) occupy a central position in socially constructed approaches to leadership. They are people’s lay theories of leadership that determine whom they perceive as leaders, what behaviors they interpret as those of leaders, and whom they allow to exert influence over them. To date, most research into ILTs has focused on how they present in adults and relatively little research has looked at their development in children, which is an important omission because it is during this early period when future adult conceptualizations of leadership are formed. The scant research that has looked at the development of children’s conceptualizations of leadership suggests that ILTs develop in phases (spatio-temporal, functional, socio-emotional, and humanitarian) between the ages of five and twelve. We test whether children’s ILTs emerge in such a phase-like manner and how the emerging conceptualizations of leadership relate to those found in adults. Gathering empirical evidence from a sample of 251 children between five and twelve-years-old, we show that the development of ILTs in children maps poorly on to the phase-based model and instead emerges with a functional core upon which perceptual dimensions expand or contract over time. Results also show that the majority of ILTs in children can be assigned to factors known to be present in generic models of adult ILTs and these increasingly coalesce into adult ILT dimensions. By discovering that children’s ILTs emerge towards adult ILTs, while becoming increasingly sophisticated, we provide a new angle for scholars addressing leadership development for future generations.