Leader Behaviours and their Perception across Organizational Levels

Éditeurs invités

• Iris K. Gauglitz, University of Bamberg
• Peter Harms, University of Alabama's Culverhouse College of Business
• Urszula Lagowska, NEOMA Business School
• Birgit Schyns, NEOMA Business School
• Kimberley Breevaart, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Synthèse

Leadership research increasingly recognizes the importance of examining both leader behaviours and their interpretations across organizational levels. Rather than treating behaviour and perception as competing perspectives, this special issue seeks to integrate them and explore how different organizational actors understand and react to leader actions in complex, modern workplaces.

The issue addresses gaps in current understanding, including how leader behaviours and their perceptions vary outside the leader-follower dyad, discrepancies between leader intentions and follower interpretations, and the effectiveness of leadership development programs. Contributors are encouraged to employ multilevel analytical approaches and diverse methodologies to capture the complexity of leadership dynamics.

Research submissions are invited across multiple areas: theoretical development of multilevel leadership models, investigation of underlying processes and contextual factors affecting behaviour perception, examination of interactions between organizational actors, and methodological innovations in measuring leader behaviour and perceptual biases.

Thèmes proposés

• Theoretical models proposing new or conceptually advanced configurations of leader behaviour and its perceptions, which consider the role of new working contexts in shaping leader behaviours and their perceptions
• Multi-level conceptualizations of the impact of leader behaviour at multiple levels of organizations with a view to understand how and why perceptions across levels differ
• Studies including models that explain why and under which conditions leader behaviour and its perceptions affect workplace outcomes, notably when leaders and others differ in their perceptions/(perceived) intentions or when behaviour is perceived as inconsistent or ambivalent
• Research that investigates polarisation in follower perceptions—why perceptions of the same behaviour may diverge significantly
• Studies looking at leader and follower behaviour and their interaction, such as how behaviours from one party trigger behavioural reactions of the other party and what that means for an effective collaboration
• Studies considering the role of organisational hierarchy in how leaders behave and how their behaviour is perceived
• Contributions considering interactions between personality traits (e.g., leader–follower trait congruence) in shaping behavioural expressions and perceptual accuracy; team outcomes of leader behaviour, for example, perception differences between team members and how this affects outcomes; and relative leader behaviour, that is, perceptions of how one follower is treated compared to others
• Studies that develop and validate new measures of leader behaviour (e.g., behavioural indicators)
• Studies that develop new measures that allow for the measurement of perceptual biases in leadership ratings and studies using advanced statistical approaches (e.g., polynomial regression analyses, multilevel modelling, pattern approaches)