Leadership Behaviors and Followers’ Self-presentations as Counter-influence Tactics

Leadership research predominately treats followers as passive influence takers in the leadership processes and suggests that leadership behaviors influence follower performance by inducing followers’ psychological processes. We challenge this view by proposing that followers’ self-presentation tactics are important mediating mechanisms linking leadership behaviors and employee performance. Across two studies, we consistently find that authoritarian leadership enhances follower performance and promotability via employees’ supplication tactics and leader’s affective trust, whereas permissive leadership enhances employee performance and promotability via employees’ self-promotion tactics and leaders’ cognitive trust. We also theorize and demonstrate that employees are more likely develop appropriate tactics to counterinfluence their leaders if they have experience encountering their parents whose parental styles are similar to their leaders’ style of leadership. In Study 2, we find that parental styles of employees’ parents moderate the relationship between leadership styles and employees’ self-representation tactics. Employees raised by authoritarian parents are more likely to react to authoritarian leaders using supplication tactics, whereas employees raised by permissive parents are more likely to react participative leaders using self-promotion tactics.