Followership styles scrutinized: temporal consistency and relationships with job attitudes and self-efficacy

Abstract

While followership has been repeatedly acknowledged as an important part of leadership, key questions are still awaiting empirical testing. In our two studies, we test Kelley’s prominent concept of followership styles for the first time in a longitudinal design. Specifically, we use a latent-state trait approach to examine the degree to which followership behaviors (i.e., active engagement [AE] and independent, critical thinking [ICT]) reflect rather stable or rather dynamic behaviors. Furthermore, we examine the relationships of followership behaviors with job attitudes (i.e., job satisfaction and organizational commitment) and self-efficacy in latent states cross-lagged models. We first test our hypotheses in a sample of N = 184 employees from eleven German service organizations, which were surveyed twice with a time lag of nine to 12 months. To replicate and extend our findings from Study 1, we conducted Study 2 with a sample of N = 570 participants from a German open-access panel, which were surveyed twice with a time lag of four months. In Study 2, we additionally test leader humility and perceived organizational support (POS) as potential moderators of the relationships between followership and job attitudes. While our findings support Kelley’s conceptualization of followership styles as rather consistent behavior patterns, mixed results were found for the relationships with the other variables. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings as well as the relevance of time in followership research.