Leadership emergence: An integrative review.

Abstract

Despite significant scholarly attention and practical importance regarding who emerges as informal and formal leaders in organizations, an integrative framework of the leadership emergence literature remains elusive. The presence of such a framework proves integral for the advancement of work in this area due to the complexity of the field, coupled with its sprawling nature across multiple disciplines (e.g., management, communication, education, economics). Accordingly, in this review, we utilize a database of 270 primary studies to put forth a distal–proximal framework of leadership emergence. In particular, we systematically review past research to answer four questions: (1) what do we know about the phenomenon of leadership emergence itself, (2) what are the antecedents of leadership emergence, (3) what outcomes are associated with leader emergence, and (4) what are the boundary conditions of leadership emergence? By introducing a conceptual framework for informal and formal emergent leadership, we highlight areas of research maturity and nascency and offer several recommendations for future work in this domain. Altogether, we highlight broad theoretical implications for the leadership, teams, and individual differences literature—and elaborate upon several benefits that an integrated framework of emergent leadership provides for organizations.

Witnessing interparental violence and leader role occupancy: the roles of insecure attachment and gender

“…As established in past research (Arvey et al. , 2007; Badura et al. , 2021; Barling and Weatherhead, 2016; Li et al ., 2018), we conceptualize leader role occupancy as holding an organizational role that has formal supervisory responsibility for the behavior and performance of others.…”

“…Drawing on a sample of MBA students, Yang et al (2020) found that students who reported higher anxious and avoidant attachment experienced more negative affect, and in turn, negative affect resulted in their supervisor's lower evaluations of this students' potential for advancement. Although progress in the study of attachment and leadership are emerging, to date, no published studies have investigated whether anxious and avoidant attachment directly relate to holding a formal leadership role (Badura et al, 2021).…”

“…We control for several variables to rule out some alternative explanations to the indirect relationship between witnessing IPV and leader role occupancy. First, we control for age and education because the likelihood of attaining a formal leadership position increases for those older and more educated (see Badura et al, 2021 for a review). Third, childhood poverty status was controlled for because of its positive association with family violence (Anderson, 1997) and negative link to leader role occupancy (Barling and Weatherhead, 2016).…”

“…Fourth, because our data were derived from archival datasets, we could not include all relevant control variables necessary to fully rule out alternative explanations to our predicted model, such as intelligence or personality traits (see Badura et al, 2021 for a summary of variables related to formal leadership emergence). Taken together, in light of the limitations associated with cross-sectional, self-reported data and single-item measures, our results should be interpreted with caution as no causal relationships can be inferred from our results.…”

“…It is now becoming clear that leader emergence is also influenced by early social environments (Liu et al, 2019), and early family experiences may particularly affect who emerges as a leader and who does not. As established in past research (Arvey et al, 2007;Badura et al, 2021;Barling and Weatherhead, 2016;Li et al, 2018), we conceptualize leader role occupancy as holding an organizational role that has formal supervisory responsibility for the behavior and performance of others.…”