Leadership as an emergent group process: A social network study of personality and leadership
Abstract
A longitudinal study was conducted on the social network of a leaderless group to explore how Big Five personality traits affect leadership emergence, in the form of receiver ties (being nominated as a leader), sender ties (nominating others as leaders), and similarity effects (nominating similar/different others as leaders). Forty one students on a 3-month study abroad program participated in intensive group work, and their perceptions of emergent task- and relationship-oriented leadership within these groups were assessed three times across the life cycle of the group. Results indicated that individuals scoring higher on extraversion, openness to experience, and conscientiousness were nominated more as task- and relationship-oriented leaders, whereas those who were more agreeable were more likely to emerge as relationship-oriented leaders. In terms of emergent followership, group members who were more agreeable and neurotic (and less open to experience) were less likely to follow relationship-oriented leaders, whereas more conscientious individuals were more likely to follow task-oriented leaders. With respect to the effects of complementarity and similarity, both task- and relationship-oriented leader nominations were based on dissimilar levels of agreeableness between leaders and followers, whereas nominated relationship-based leaders tended to have similar levels of openness to experience to followers. Implications of these results are discussed.
Get full access to this article
View all access and purchase options for this article.
References
Aluja A., Garcı’a O., Garcı’a L. F. (2003). Relationships among extraversion, openness to experience, and sensation seeking. Personality and Individual Differences, 35, 671–680.
Bales R. F. (1953). The equilibrium problem in small groups. In Parsons T., Bales R. F., Shils E. A. (Eds.), Working papers in the theory of action (pp. 221–236). New York, NJ: Free Press.
Bauer T. N., Green S. G., Bauer T. N. (1996). Development of leader–member exchange: A longitudinal test. Academy of Management Journal, 39, 1538–1567.
Bettenhausen K., Murnighan J. K. (1991). The development of an intragroup norm and the effects of interpersonal and structural challenges. Administrative Science Quarterly, 36, 20–35.
Bolger N., Schilling E. A. (1991). Personality and the problems of everyday life: The role of neuroticism in exposure and reactivity to daily stressors. Journal of Personality, 59, 355–386.
Brewer M. (1991). The social self: On being the same and different at the same time. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 17, 475–482.
Burke C., Stagl C., Klein C., Goodwin G., Salas E., Halpin S. (2006). What types of leadership behaviors are functional in teams? A meta-analysis. Leadership Quarterly, 17, 288–307.
Campbell L., Simpson J., Stewart M., Manning J. (2003). Putting personality in social context: Extraversion, emergent leadership, and the availability of rewards. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29, 1547–1559.
Carson J., Tesluk P., Marrone J. (2007). Shared leadership in teams: An investigation of antecedent conditions and performance. Academy of Management Journal, 50, 1217–1234.
Cartwright D., Zander A. (1960). Group dynamics – Research and theory. Evanston, IL: Row Peterson.
Collinson D. (2006). Rethinking followership: A post-structuralist analysis of follower identities. The Leadership Quarterly, 17, 179–189.
Curry T., Kenny D. (1974). The effects of perceived and actual similarity in values and personality in process of interpersonal attraction. Quality and Quantity, 8, 29–44.
Day D. V., Gronn P., Salas E. (2004). Leadership capacity in teams. Leadership Quarterly, 15, 857–880.
De Hoogh A. H. B., Den Hartog D. N., Koopman P. L. (2005). Linking the Big Five-Factors of personality to charismatic and transactional leadership; perceived dynamic work environment as a moderator. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 26, 839–865.
DeRue D. S., Ashford S. (2010). Who will lead and who will follow? A social process of leadership identity construction in organizations. Academy of Management Review, 35, 627–647.
DeRue D. S., Nahrgang J., Wellman N., Humphrey S.(2011). Trait and behavioral theories of leadership: An integration and meta-analytic test of their relative validity. Personnel Psychology, 64, 7–52.
Duggan C., Sham P., Lee A., Minne C., Murray R.(1995). Neuroticism: A vulnerability marker for depression evidence from a family study. Journal of Affective Disorders, 35, 139–143.
Eagleson G., Waldersee R., Simmons R. (2000). Leadership behaviour similarity as a basis of selection into a management team. British Journal of Social Psychology, 39, 301–308.
Ehrhart M., Klein K. (2001). Predicting followers’ preferences for charismatic leadership: The influence of follower values and personality. Leadership Quarterly, 12, 153–179.
Emery C. (in press). Uncovering the role of emotional abilities in leadership emergence. A longitudinal analysis of leadership networks. Social Networks.
Felfe J., Schyns B. (2006). Personality and the perception of transformational leadership: The impact of extraversion, neuroticism, personal need for structure, and occupational self-efficacy. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 36, 708–739.
Felfe J., Schyns B. (2010). Followers’ personality and the perception of transformational leadership: Further evidence for the similarity hypothesis. British Journal of Management, 21, 393–410.
Fernandez R. M. (1991). Structural bases of leadership in intraorganizational networks. Social Psychology Quarterly, 54, 36–53.
Fitzsimons D., James K., Denyer D. (2011). Alternative approaches for studying shared and distributed leadership. International Journal of Management Reviews, 13, 313–328.
Gevers J., Peeters M. (2009). A pleasure working together? The effects of dissimilarity in team member conscientiousness on team temporal processes and individual satisfaction. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 30, 379–400.
Hemphill J. K., Coons A. E. (1957). Development of the Leader Behavior Description Questionnaire. In Stogdill R. M., Coons A. E. (Eds.), Leader behavior: Its description and measurement (pp. 6–38). Columbus: The Ohio State University, Bureau of Business Research.
Hetland H., Sandal G., Johnsen T. (2008). Followers’ personality and leadership. Journal of Leadership & Organization Studies, 14, 322–331.
Hogg M. A. (2001). A social identity theory of leadership. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 5, 184–200.
Homan A. C., Hollenbeck J. R., Humphrey S. E., van Knippenberg D., Ilgen D. R., van Kleef G. A.(2008). Facing differences with an open mind: Openness to experience, salience of intragroup differences, and performance of diverse work groups. Academy Of Management Journal, 51, 1204–1222.
John O. P., Srivastava S. (1999). The Big Five trait taxonomy: History, measurement, and theoretical perspectives. In Pervin L., John O.P. (Eds.), Handbook of personality: Theory and research (pp. 102–138). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Judge T. A., Bono J., Ilies R., Gerhardt M. (2002). Personality and leadership: A qualitative and quantitative review. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87, 765–780.
Judge T., Piccolo R., Ilies R. (2004). The forgotten ones? The validity of consideration and initiating structure in leadership research. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89, 36–51.
Judge T. A, Piccolo R., Kosalka T. (2009). The bright and dark sides of leader traits: A review and theoretical extension of the leader trait paradigm. The Leadership Quarterly, 20, 855–875.
Kaiser R., Hogan R., Craig S. B. (2008). Leadership and the fate of organizations. American Psychologist, 63, 96–110.
Kristof-Brown A., Barrick M., Stevens C. (2005). When opposites attract: A multi-sample demonstration of complementary person–team fit on extraversion. Journal of Personality, 73, 935–958.
Lord R., Hall R. (2003). Identity, leadership categorization, and leadership schema. In van Knippenberg D., Hogg M. A. (Eds.), Leadership and power: Identity processes in groups and organizations (pp. 48–64). London, UK: Sage.
McCrae R. (1987). Creativity, divergent thinking and openness to experience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 1258–126.
McCrae R., Costa P. (1987). Validation of the five-factor model of personality across instruments and observers. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 81–90.
Mehra A., Marineau J., Lopes A. B., Kass T. K. (2009). The co-evolution of friendship and leadership networks in small groups. In Graen G., Graen J. A (Eds.), LMX leadership: The series, Vol. VII. Charlotte, NC: Information Age.
Mehra A., Smith B., Dixon A., Robertson B. (2006). Distributed leadership in teams: The network of leadership perceptions and team performance. Leadership Quarterly, 17, 232–245.
Meindl J. (1995). The romance of leadership as a follower-centric theory: A social constructionist approach. Leadership Quarterly, 6, 329–341.
Moreno J. L. (1932). Application of the group method to classification. New York, NY: National Committee on Prisons and Prison Labor.
Moreno J. L. (1947). Contributions of sociometry to research methodology in sociology. American Sociological Review, 12, 287–292.
Moss S. A., Ngu S. (2006). The relationship between personality and leadership preferences. Current Research in Social Psychology, 11, 1088–7423.
Northouse G. (2007). Leadership theory and practice (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Offstein E. H., Madhavan R., Gnyawali D. R. (2006). Pushing the frontier of LMX research: The contribution of triads. In Graen G., Graen J. A. (Eds.), Sharing network leadership (pp. 95–117). Greenwich, CT: Information Age.
Pearce C. L, Conger J. A., Locke E. A. (2007). Shared leadership theories. Leadership Quarterly, 18, 281–288.
Phillips A. S., Bedeian A. G. (1994). Leader–follower exchange quality: The role of personal and interpersonal attributes. Academy of Management Journal, 37, 990–1001.
Ridgell S. D., Lounsbury J. W. (2004). Predicting academic success: General intelligence, “Big Five” personality traits, and work drive. College Student Journal, 38, 607–619.
Riggio R. E., Chaleff I., Lipman-Blumen J. (2008). The art of followership. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Riley A., Burke P. (1995). Identities and self-verification in the small group. Social Psychology Quarterly, 58, 61–73.
Roberts B., Chernyshenko O., Stark S., Goldberg L. (2005). The structure of conscientiousness: An empirical investigation based on seven major personality questionnaires. Personnel Psychology, 58, 103–39.
Schyns B., Felfe J. (2006). The personality of followers and its effect on the perception of leadership: An overview, a study, and a research agenda. Small Group Research, 37, 522–539.
Shondrick S. J., Lord R. G. (2010). Implicit leadership and followership theories: Dynamic structures for leadership perceptions, memory, and leader follower processes. In Hodgkinson G. P., Ford J. K. (Eds.), International review of industrial and organizational psychology (Vol. 25, pp. 1–33). Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons.
Snijders T. A. B. (2009). Longitudinal methods of network analysis. In Meyers B. (Ed.), Encyclopaedia of complexity and system science (pp. 5998–6013). New York, NY: Springer.
Snijders T. A. B., van de Bunt G. G., Steglich C. E. G.(2010). Introduction to actor-based models for network dynamics. Social Networks, 32, 44–60.
Spangler W., House R., Palrecha R. (2004). Personality and leadership. In Schneider B., Smith D. B. (Eds.), Personality and organizations (pp. 251–290). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence-Erlbaum.
Stevens C. D., Ash R. A. (2001). Selecting employees for fit: Personality and preferred managerial style. Journal of Managerial Issues, 4, 500–517.
Swann W., Read S. (1981). Self-verification processes: How we sustain our self-conceptions. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 17, 351–372.
Sy T. (2010). What do you think of followers? Examining the content, structure, and consequences of implicit followership theories. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 113, 73–84.
Taggar S., Hackett R., Saha S. (1999). Leadership emergence in autonomous work teams: Antecedents and outcomes. Personnel Psychology, 52, 899–926.
Thorpe R., Gold J., Lawler J. (2011). Locating distributed leadership. International Journal of Management Reviews, 13, 239–250.
Uhl-Bien M. (2006). Relational leadership theory: Exploring the social processes of leadership and organizing. Leadership Quarterly, 17, 654–676.
Van Vugt M., Hogan R., Kaiser R. (2008). Leadership, followership, and evolution: Some lessons from the past. American Psychologist, 63, 182–196.
Yukl G., (2009). Leadership in organizations. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Cite article
Cite article
Cite article
OR
Download to reference manager
If you have citation software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice
Information, rights and permissions
Information
Published In
Article first published online: January 10, 2013
Issue published: January 2013
Keywords
Authors
Metrics and citations
Metrics
Journals metrics
This article was published in Group Processes & Intergroup Relations.
VIEW ALL JOURNAL METRICSArticle usage*
Total views and downloads: 11823
*Article usage tracking started in December 2016
Altmetric
See the impact this article is making through the number of times it’s been read, and the Altmetric Score.
Learn more about the Altmetric Scores
Articles citing this one
Receive email alerts when this article is cited
Web of Science: 37 view articles Opens in new tab
Crossref: 0
-
The Big Five and Collaborative Problem Solving: A Narrative Systematic...
-
Personality traits and leadership styles of students: Evidence from Ec...
-
Personality and Person-Work Environment Fit: A Study Based on the RIAS...
-
Shared leadership arrangements for creativity and innovation
-
Toxic Leadership, Destructive Leadership, and Identity Leadership: Wha...
-
What motivates individuals to emerge as leaders? A regulatory focus th...
-
How social context impacts the emergence of leadership structures
-
Let’s agree about nice leaders: A literature review and meta-analysis ...
-
Observing Leadership as and in Networks: A Multilevel Investigation of...
-
A case study of university student networks and the COVID-19 pandemic ...
-
Traits and time in leadership emergence: A longitudinal study
-
The Emergence of Emergent Leadership: A Comprehensive Framework and Di...
-
Personality and Leadership
-
Personality and Leadership
-
Disentangling the relationship between empowering leader behaviors and...
-
Transformational leadership and the big five personality traits of cou...
-
Personal networks and psychological attributes: Exploring individual d...
-
Show me your expertise before teaming up
-
Predicting Leader Emergence with Bright and Dark Traits
-
Adapting Leadership Perceptions Across Tasks: Micro-Origins of Informa...
-
Putting emergence back in leadership emergence: A dynamic, multilevel,...
-
PILAR: A Model of Collaboration to Encapsulate Social Psychology
-
Jealousy at work: The role of rivals’ characteristics
-
Teams as Complex Adaptive Systems: Reviewing 17 Years of Research
-
The problem of employees' network centrality and supervisors' error in...
-
Emergent Leadership Structures in Informal Groups: A Dynamic, Cognitiv...
-
Review of the effects of Five Factor Model personality traits on netwo...
-
Is perceived athlete leadership quality related to team effectiveness?...
-
Identifying Dynamics of Counseling Leadership: A Content Analysis Stud...
-
Social Network Analysis in Organizations as a Management Support Tool
-
The Content and Process of Counseling Leadership: Implications for Res...
-
Shared leadership and commonality: A policy-capturing study
-
Who takes the lead? Social network analysis as a pioneering tool to in...
-
Transformational leadership in teams – the effects of a team leader’s ...
-
Servant Leadership and Work Engagement: The Contingency Effects of Lea...
-
Leading groups: Leadership as a group process
Figures and tables
Figures & Media
Tables
View Options
Get access
Access options
If you have access to journal content via a personal subscription, university, library, employer or society, select from the options below:
loading institutional access options
Alternatively, view purchase options below:
Purchase 24 hour online access to view and download content.
Access journal content via a DeepDyve subscription or find out more about this option.
