The eye of the beholder: a meta-analytic examination of the convergence between leader and observer perceptions of leadership
"The convergence between a leader's assessment of his/her leadership behaviors and assessments from the leader's subordinates, peers, and superiors—also known as ""leader insight""—is linked to important organizational and leader outcomes. Unfortunately, many questions remain regarding the extent to which leaders have insight into their leadership behaviors. This study examines whether leaders' perceptions of their leadership behaviors are similar to or different from observers' perceptions. Importantly, we investigate whether leader-observer agreement is influenced by type of observer and type of leadership. First, we meta-analyzed the relationship (i.e., correlation) between leader- and observer-ratings along several dimensions of leadership (e.g., initiating structure, consideration, transactional, and transformational leadership). We found that leader-observer agreement was moderate overall but was stronger for task-oriented leadership behaviors (e.g., transactional) than for relationship-oriented leadership behaviors (e.g., transformational). Our findings also demonstrated that a leader's subordinates, peers, and superiors had similar views of the leader's behaviors. To better understand leader-observer agreement, we also meta-analyzed the differences in leader and observer mean-level reporting (i.e., Cohen's d). We found that leaders generally under-reported task-oriented leadership but over-reported relationship-oriented behaviors relative to observers. Last, our results indicated that sampling method and scale measure moderated leader-observer convergence. Implications of these findings for research, theory, and practice are discussed."
leadership, self-other agreement, leader insight
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign