Event.

95th Annual Midwestern Psychological Association Conference

Abstract.

Purpose. Leadership qualities are highly desired across a multitude of settings including industry, academia, and the military. Recent findings suggest that leadership identities are dynamic and subject to influence by a several factors. For example, Lord and colleagues (2020) recently found that leadership schemas are sensitive to priming effects. In the present study, we examined whether the salience of leadership-associated stimuli could be modulated by priming leadership identities.

Procedure. Forty-two undergraduate participants completed a primed lexical decision task. The task consisted of 72 trials divided into two parts. The first part of each trial began with a forced response (yes/no) to one of two questions: (1) “Does this word describe you?”, or (2) “Would close others use this word to describe you?”. These prompts were followed by a leader-associated, follower-associated, or neutral word that completed the priming query. The second part of each trial consisted of a lexical decision task in which participants made determinations as to whether a string of letters represented a word or a word-like nonword (e.g., braffic). In this part, words were either leadership-associated (e.g., charismatic), or followership-associated (e.g., obey). Participants also completed a series of self-report assessments that provide data on demographics, leadership and followership identities, internal and external constraints, self-regulatory focus, and adolescent leadership activities.

Results. Identity salience was operationalized as response times for accurate responses in the lexical decision task. A 3 (priming condition) x 2 (probe condition) factorial analysis of variance was conducted with identity salience as the dependent variable. Results indicated that there was no priming condition by probe condition interaction, F(2,82) = 1.773, p = 0.176, partial eta sq = 0.041. There was also no main effect of prime condition, F(2,82) = 0.898, p = 0.411, partial eta sq = 0.021. However, there was a main effect for probe condition, F(1,42) = 9.244, p = 0.004, partial eta sq = 0.184. Leader probes (Mleader = 865ms) evoked faster response times compared to follower probes (Mfollower = 908ms). These analyses were complemented by examining whether self-reported tendencies to endorse leadership and followership prime queries were associated with response times during lexical decision. The relation between self-report assessments and identity salience measures were also explored.

Conclusions. We found partial support for the momentary modifiability of leadership identity. With more data, we will be able to further explore the dynamic nature of leadership identities and better inform leadership training programs.

Contributors.

Rachel Strong, Elizabeth Key, Erika Allen, Andrew Finch, Denise M. Ealy, Emily Maldonado, Kendall Perssico, & James R. Houston