When the appeal of a dominant leader is greater than a prestige leader.

Across the globe we witness the rise of populist authoritarian leaders who are overbearing in their narrative, aggressive in behavior, and often exhibit questionable moral character. Drawing on evolutionary theory of leadership emergence, in which dominance and prestige are seen as dual routes to leadership, we provide a situational and psychological account for when and why dominant leaders are preferred over other respected and admired candidates. We test our hypothesis using three studies, encompassing more than 140,000 participants, across 69 countries and spanning the past two decades. We find robust support for our hypothesis that under a situational threat of economic uncertainty (as exemplified by the poverty rate, the housing vacancy rate, and the unemployment rate) people escalate their support for dominant leaders. Further, we find that this phenomenon is mediated by participants' psychological sense of a lack of personal control. Together, these results provide large-scale, globally representative evidence for the structural and psychological antecedents that increase the preference for dominant leaders over their prestigious counterparts.

Re-imagining decision making: addressing a discrete social driver of HIV/AIDS through the lens of complexity science.

This article argues that decision making is a discrete social driver that can be associated with the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the Limpopo province in South Africa. The authors argue that complexity science can inform future research and interventions by presenting two decision making frameworks arising out of complexity science that have the potential to enable young people to better negotiate decision-making contexts whilst simultaneously opening spaces of dialogue that can mitigate the impact of HIV-risk in specific, punctuated contexts. The methodological design was prompted by findings from youth-oriented community engagement projects that include Communication Conversations and Sex & Relationships Education. The proposed methods have the potential to exploit the phenomenon of leadership emergence as a product of decision making at critical moments. This has the potential to promote the growth of home-grown leadership skill sets that make sense to young people and to enable them better manage their own health, thus reducing risk and vulnerability to HIV infection and sexual violence.

How does perceived overqualification promote employees' creative deviance: The role of leadership emergence and job autonomy.

Inspiring the creative potential of overqualified employees can facilitate a mutually beneficial outcome for both the company and the employees. However, further investigation is required to ascertain how to stimulate the perceived overqualification of employees to carry out creative deviance. Drawing upon role theory, this study explores the impact mechanism of perceived overqualification on employee creative deviance, with leadership emergence as the mediating variable, and further examines the moderating role of job autonomy. Adopting a two-stage design, 362 valid data samples were collected from various companies, and analysis was conducted using partial least squares structural equation modeling. The results indicate a positive correlation between perceived overqualification and creative deviance. Perceived overqualification not only positively influences leadership emergence but it also indirectly affects creative deviance through leadership emergence. Furthermore, when individuals with perceived overqualification and possess a greater level of job autonomy, they are more likely to engage in creative deviant behavior. The findings contribute to understanding the mediating mechanisms and boundary conditions of employees' perceived overqualification influencing creative deviance from a positive perspective, offering valuable managerial insights for organizations.

Differential Behavioral Pathways Linking Personality to Leadership Emergence and Effectiveness in Groups.

This study integrates leadership process models with process models of personality and behavioral personality science to examine the behavioral-perceptual pathways that explain interpersonal personality traits' divergent relation to group leadership evaluations. We applied data from an online group interaction study (N = 364) alternately assigning participants as leaders conducting brief tasks. We used four variable types to build the pathways in multiple mediator models: (a) Self-reported personality traits, (b) video recordings of expressed interpersonal behaviors coded by 6 trained raters, (c) interpersonal impressions, and (d) mutual evaluations of leadership emergence/effectiveness. We find interpersonal big five traits to differently relate to the two leadership outcomes via the behavioral-perceptual pathways: Extraversion was more important to leadership emergence due to impressions of assertiveness evoked by task-focused behavior being strongly valued. Agreeableness/emotional stability were more important to leadership effectiveness due to impressions of trustworthiness/calmness evoked by member-focused/calm behavior being stronger valued.

Introverted and yet effective? A faceted approach to the relationship between leadership and extraversion.

Introduction: Extraversion and its facets of assertiveness and sociability were identified as stable predictors for leader emergence and effectiveness. However, recent research suggested that extraversion may lie in the eyes of the beholder; it might not be the leader's possession but their followers' attribution of the trait that shapes these criteria of leader success. Methods: In our study, we reverse-engineered this relationship and assessed the effects of effective leadership behaviors on personality perceptions. More specifically, we created scenarios of a leader responding to coordination challenges with passive-avoidant, transactional, or transformational leadership behaviors. We presented 204 participants with these scenarios and assessed how extraverted, assertive, and sociable they perceived the leader to be. Results: Interestingly, and not fully meeting our expectations, ascriptions of extraversion and its facets of assertiveness and sociability did not directly relate to the effectiveness of the behaviors, as the moderately effective transactional leadership style garnered the highest ascriptions of extraversion and its facets. Further, ascriptions of extraversion to the transformational behavior of intellectual stimulation were remarkably low, matched only by the laissez-faire dimension of the passive-avoidant leadership style. Discussion: We integrate and contrast these unexpected but explainable findings with current research, discuss potential associations between introversion and empowering leadership practices and provide suggestions for future discourse, illustrating the potential of investigating the presence of an introverted leadership advantage in the workplace of tomorrow.

When Do Team Members Share the Lead? A Social Network Analysis.

Shared leadership is not only about individual team members engaging in leadership, but also about team members adopting the complementary follower role. However, the question of what enables team members to fill in each of these roles and the corresponding influence of formal leaders have remained largely unexplored. Using a social network perspective allows us to predict both leadership and followership ties between team members based on considerations of implicit leadership and followership theories. From this social information processing perspective, we identify individual team members' political skill and the formal leaders' empowering leadership as important qualities that facilitate the adoption of each the leader and the follower role. Results from a social network analysis in a R&D department with 305 realized leadership ties support most of our hypotheses.

Corrigendum: Take a "selfie": Examining how leaders emerge from leader self-awareness, self-leadership, and self-efficacy.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.635085.].

Will the real leaders please stand up? The emergence of shared leadership in semi-professional soccer teams.

OBJECTIVES: High-quality leadership is often regarded as one of the main sources of competitive advantage. Especially within sport teams, a team's leadership structure has historically been considered to be stable across the season, with the coach and team captain as the formal, and often sole, leaders. In line with recent organizational research, the present study aims to broaden this perspective by also taking informal leaders into account and exploring how leadership structures among athletes within sport teams evolve over the course of a season. DESIGN: Using social network analysis, we analyzed the leadership structure of 20 semi-professional soccer teams (N=460 players, Mage=23.50 years; SD=4.55) at the start of the season and then again halfway through the season. More specifically, for each team we constructed a leadership network for four leadership roles (task, motivational, social, and external leadership) at these two time points. RESULTS: Findings suggest that leadership structures in sport teams can change considerably over the course of the competitive season, thereby challenging the classic view of stable, vertical leadership structures. The transition to more shared forms of leadership can be attributed to the emergence of informal leaders over time as players engage more strongly in leadership roles. Furthermore, our results suggest that as teams evolve towards shared leadership their functioning and performance benefits from these changes. CONCLUSIONS: Based on these findings, we recommend that coaches actively implement a structure of shared leadership and seek to develop the leadership qualities of formal and informal athlete leaders.

Corrigendum: Take a "Selfie": Examining How Leaders Emerge From Leader Self-Awareness, Self-Leadership, and Self-Efficacy.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.635085.].

The Bottleneck Metaphor of Leadership Culture: How Shared Understandings About Leadership Develop in Groups and Impede Diversity and Effectiveness of Leaders.

There are two big problems related to leadership today: unequal representation and high failure rates among leaders. This conceptual paper argues that commonly shared values, assumptions, and beliefs about leadership, i.e., universal leadership culture, are the common cause of both problems. After the concepts and levels related to leadership culture were explained, we introduce a multilevel, multi-actor process model named the bottleneck metaphor of leadership culture. This metaphor describes how leadership cultures are co-constructed by multiple actors based on their involvement in leader selection and reproduce themselves in groups over time based on emergent leaders' characteristics. Next, a diagnostic tool called "the leadership mirror" is proposed for organizations that want to assess their leadership culture's current state as a starting point for further interventions. Specific suggestions are made for various actors, ranging from individuals to organizations, for their possible roles in preventing undesired leadership cultures.

Take a "Selfie": Examining How Leaders Emerge From Leader Self-Awareness, Self-Leadership, and Self-Efficacy.

It is important to understand the processes behind how and why individuals emerge as leaders, so that the best and most capable individuals may occupy leadership positions. So far, most literature in this area has focused on individual characteristics, such as personality or cognitive ability. While interactions between individuals and context do get research attention, we still lack a comprehensive understanding of how the social context at work may help individuals to emerge as leaders. Such knowledge could make an important contribution toward getting the most capable, rather than the most dominant or narcissistic individuals, into leadership positions. In the present work, we contribute toward closing this gap by testing a mediation chain linking a leader's leader self-awareness to a follower's leadership emergence with two time-lagged studies (n study1 = 449, n study2 = 355). We found that the leader's leader self-awareness was positively related to (a) the follower's leadership emergence and (b) the follower's nomination for promotion and that both relationships were serially mediated by the follower's self-leadership and the follower's leader self-efficacy. We critically discuss our findings and provide ideas for future research.

Too Insecure to Be a Leader: The Role of Attachment in Leadership Emergence.

The antecedents of leadership emergence have received increasing attention over the past decades. Extant work has found that traits that involve getting along with other members in social relations can help employees emerge as leaders. However, attachment has been ignored, even though it can provide a distinct relational perspective to getting along. This study investigates the relationship between attachment and leadership emergence as well as the mediating role of negative emotion and the moderating role of initiating structure in the relationship. Specifically, based on multisource data of 100 employees and their supervisors, the results reveal that avoidant attachment and anxious attachment exert a negative impact on leadership emergence via negative emotion. Moreover, the mediating effect on the above relationship is weaker when employees are at a high initiating structure level. The findings imply that insecurely attached employees can also be leaders if they expend more effort and focus more on task completion.

Women Who Emerge as Leaders in Temporarily Assigned Work Groups: Attractive and Socially Competent but Not Babyfaced or Naïve?

The underrepresentation of women in top positions has been in the spotlight of research for decades. Prejudice toward female leaders, which decreases women's chances of emerging as leaders, has been discussed as a potential reason. Aiming to investigate the underlying mechanisms of this prejudice, we focused on the question of how facial characteristics might influence women's leadership emergence. Because other research has related ascribed social competence and ascribed naïveté to attractiveness and babyfacedness, respectively, we hypothesized that ascribed social competence would mediate the impact of ascribed attractiveness on leadership emergence and that ascribed naïveté would mediate the impact of ascribed babyfacedness on leadership emergence. In a pilot study, we analyzed data from 101 participants of a women's leadership contest held in 2015 in Germany. We then confirmed these results in a methodologically improved main study on other women who participated in the contest in one of two other years: 2016 and 2017 (N = 195). Women applied to participate in the contest by recording their answers to several questions in a video interview. In the contest, they were assigned to teams of about ten women each and worked on several assessment-center-like tasks. After each task, each member of each team nominated the three women they believed showed the best leadership potential in their group. We operationalized women's leadership emergence as the number of nominations received. We measured participants' facial attractiveness, babyfacedness, social competence, and naïveté by having raters follow a specifically developed rating manual to rate the answers the women gave in the video interviews. In both studies, the results indicated that women with higher ascribed facial attractiveness had higher ascribed social competence, which significantly predicted leadership emergence in the contest. Likewise, women with higher ascribed babyfacedness had higher ascribed naïveté, which significantly, albeit only slightly, negatively predicted leadership emergence. We discuss the implications of the results for personnel selection.