Impact of Leader’s Goal Framing on Followership Behavior: The Role of Work Meaning and Power Dependence

Abstract

While there is growing interest in leader–follower relationships in the leadership literature, little is known about how a leader’s framing effect triggers employees’ proactive behaviors. This research aims to extend previous knowledge about the effects of leaders’ goal framing and uncover their potential impacts on followership behaviors. Drawing on social information processing theory, this study proposes that both types of goal framing (gaining and losing) indirectly influence employees’ followership behaviors by mobilizing their sense of work meaning, especially when they have a power dependence on their leaders, using the method of questionnaire measurement, CFA analysis, hierarchical regression analysis, and the bootstrap tested hypotheses. The results show that gain framing indirectly contributes to employees’ followership behaviors by enhancing work meaning. Furthermore, this positive indirect relationship is stronger for employees with high power dependence. Yet another finding reveals that loss framing negatively impacts followership behavior by reducing employees’ sense of work meaning, which is unaffected by power dependence. From the perspective of the framing effect, this study verifies the influence of goal framing on employees’ behaviors and illustrates the effect of work meaning as a mechanism of goal framing on followership behavior.