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This article advances prior theory on inclusive leadership to better understand how leaders foster team creativity through members’ experience that their uniqueness belongs within the team (i.e., team-derived inclusion). We argue that leaders can instigate such sense of inclusion in their team by engaging in two behaviors: stimulating all members of the team to fully express their unique viewpoints and perspectives ( harvesting the benefits of diversity) and facilitating beliefs about the value of differences in the team ( cultivating value-in-diversity beliefs). In Study 1 ( n = 491 employees), we validated newly developed scales measuring these two leader behaviors. Using a sample of 38 teams within one organization (Study 2), we showed that harvesting the benefits of diversity, without also cultivating value-in-diversity beliefs, has a negative effect on team-derived inclusion and indirectly team creativity. In Study 3, we demonstrated based on 93 teams from multiple organizations, while ruling out several alternative explanations, that harvesting the benefits of diversity positively relates to team-derived inclusion and indirectly team creativity, if leaders also cultivated value-in-diversity beliefs. Our model and findings across studies are the first to shed light on inclusive leadership as double-edged sword in that leaders may need to complement harvesting with cultivating to prevent negative effects and elicit positive effects on inclusion and, eventually, team creativity.

The topic of work engagement is moving up on the managerial agenda as it sets the stage for numerous beneficial outcomes for both organizations and their employees. It is clear, however, that not all employees are equally engaged in their job. The current study taps into theory on positive self-fulfilling prophecies induced by leaders’ high expectations of followers (i.e., the Pygmalion effect) and examines their potential to facilitate follower work engagement. By integrating literature on implicit followership theories with the Pygmalion model, we investigate the assumption that leaders’ high expectations are universally perceived as and therefore foster the same desirable results for all employees. We argue and find that the extent to which followers’ work engagement benefits from high leader expectations depends on their implicit followership theory of industry (IFTI; i.e., the general belief that employees are hardworking, productive, and willing to go above and beyond). We also find that when followers hold a high IFTI but feel that their leader does not convey high expectations, their engagement at work suffers. In addition, we examine whether leaders’ IFTI forms the origin of naturally occurring Pygmalion effects. Our results show that a positive IFTI among leaders is especially interpreted as high/positive expectations by followers who also hold a high/positive IFTI. Our study introduces boundary conditions to the Pygmalion-at-work model by revealing the interactive role of leaders’ and followers’ implicit followership theory of industry. We contribute to the advancement of cognitive, follower-centric perspectives on leadership and provide evidence for the importance of schema congruence.

In response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses closed their offices and asked their employees to work from home. The transition to remote work has yielded performance gains for many companies; so much so that many firms are planning to continue to use remote work after the pandemic subsides. Nevertheless, such benefits may not be distributed equally throughout the workforce. Drawing on the sociocognitive theory of socioeconomic status (SES), we predict that one’s home working environment features salient signals of their social status that affect their performance. Based on a sample of 304 remote workers from within the United States collected during the COVID-19 shutdown, we find that individuals whose home offices connote higher levels of SES report a greater sense of control over their environment, which ultimately is associated with higher levels of perceived job performance. Furthermore, we find that the more time an individual spends in their home office, the stronger the relationship between their environment-based SES and their personal sense of control. Taken as a whole, our findings suggest that because home working environments are arrayed along an SES gradient, they present another mechanism by which pre-existing inequalities may be made salient as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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