The ideal and the counter-ideal follower - advancing implicit followership theories.
Nina M. Junker, Sebastian Stegmann, Stephan Braun and Rolf Van Dick
Leadership and organisational development Journal, Volume 37 Number 8, 2016.
The argument it makes:
That people enter leader-follower relationships with an implicit belief about that makes a good follower, and what doesn’t. When followers act in certain ways, they confirm these beliefs and are then indelibly labeled by the leader as either ideal, or non-ideal.
Key findings:
That we do indeed enter leader-follower relationships with these implicit theories about what makes good followers (and also leaders, but that isn’t discussed in this article). When a follower shows a behaviour we associate with our pre-set ideas of what makes a good follower - e.g. being honest - we tend to then subconsciously categorise that person as being an ideal follower, and treat them as such in future interactions.
Conversely, if they show behaviours we associate with non-ideal followers, we instead categorise them mentally as non-ideal, and unconsciously treat them differently based on this mental categorisation.
Conclusions:
This aligns with other work done on confirmation bias. If we tend to believe that a good follower is loyal, and we discern loyal behaviours in a follower, we will then see more ideal behaviours than non-ideal, and believe the person to be a good follower. Conversely, if someone is late to a meeting and we believe that punctuality is typical of good leaders, we will tend to notice more of the less-ideas characteristics of this follower going forward. First impressions, then, do appear to matter - even if we try not to let them.
Practical applications:
For leaders, it is important to understand what your initial impression of someone is, and that this will tend to colour your perception of that follower’s behaviours. If they didn’t make a good impression at the outset, we might be harsher with them than they deserve, especially when it comes to things like performance reviews or pay raises. For this reason it is important to have a record of behaviour and actions that can provide objective evidence for later assessment, rather than just going by our potentially-tainted memories and emotional reviews. No one is perfectly objective in their mental reviews.