The affective dyadic processes underlying leadership
ID
MSCA-2020-JHofmans02
Supervisors
Project description
Leadership, being a social influencing process aimed at obtaining cooperation from others to achieve organizational goals, puts connecting to others front and center. For example, in transformational leadership theory, which has been the most popular leadership theory in the past 20 years, looking out for followers’ needs, listening to them, supporting them, coaching them and caring for them (referred to as individualized consideration) is considered a key quality of transformational leaders. Despite its crucial role, however, the processes that allow leaders to connect to their followers have been largely neglected in empirical research on leadership, conceivably because leadership has traditionally been studied with a nearly exclusive focus on between-leader differences rooted in leaders’ personality traits (Doci, Hofmans, Nijs, & Judge, 2020). Indeed, there is a large discrepancy between the notion of leadership being inherently dyadic and dynamic and research on leadership, being predominantly static and focusing primarily on the leader (Hofmans et al., 2019). The implication thereof is that we know little about the interpersonal processes that drive good or bad leader-follower connections, the factors that impact those processes, and the extent to which those processes are stable within leaders. The present project aims at addressing these issues, examining the extent to which dyadic affective dynamics are at the basis of satisfactory and productive leader-follower relationships. To this end, one might look at patterns such as coregulation—or the bidirectional linkage of emotional channels between partners contributing to emotional stability—, synchronicity—or covariation of the dyad member’s feelings over time—, and transmission— the process in which one person’s emotions predict changes in the partner’s emotions at a subsequent time point—. Understanding such affective dynamics is critical because they pertain to the very core of what leadership is: connecting to others to obtain cooperation. Moreover, research on factors that affect those processes has major relevance for practice because it might inform us on ways to improve such connections through training or organizational interventions.
About the research Group
WOPS Research Group
Work and Organizational Psychology studies the behavior of people when executing a job, in a variety of organization types. Work is surely more than earning money in itself.
At VUB’s WOPS lab, we approach our domain not only from an individual point of view, but also include social psychological insights. Within this field of psychology, ‘human resource management’ receives major emphasis in our education program from a scientific as well as from a practical point of view, based on insights from work, personnel and organizational psychology, but also from ergonomics, and taking account of health issues. Teamwork, dealing with conflicts, organizational culture and change, leadership and political or ganizational behavior are but a few of the various topics being dealt with. But also how one chooses the most fitting employees, trains and develops them, motivates and rewards them, are all investigated, besides current societal issues such as mobbing at work, emotional labor, work in non-profit organizations, managerial career development, etc.