Event.

95th Annual Midwestern Psychological Association Conference

Abstract.

Leadership identities are important in many settings, such as: military, management, and politics. Leadership is a social construct reliant on followership as a social counterpart. Cognitive priming has been shown to affect leadership and followership identities, but the extent of these effects is unknown in current research. Leadership identities are thought to be fluid, fluctuating within the person and over time. The purpose of this study is to identify if priming social support versus social rejection affects the salient leadership identity, and the degree of which internal and external constraints modify associations identified in the former. The project will be to help establish factors that influence someone’s ability to become a leader in the moment. The methods used consist of a writing activity to prime participants, followed by a lexical decision task focused on words with leader or follower schemas, a prime-probe lexical decision task, and lastly using self-report data about participants focused on demographics, leadership and followership identity, internal and external constraints, self-regulatory focus, and adolescent leadership activities. We hypothesize that leadership identity will be stronger in individuals who have been primed with leadership schema words, but also that internal and external constraints will have a significant impact on if the priming affects the participants identity. Future research can investigate further how to prime individuals for leadership, particularly in workplace or military settings, to garner more effective results.

Contributors.

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