Roots Run Deep: How Parental Styles Influence Employees’ Acceptance of Different Leadership Styles

Whether employees accept or endorse certain types of leadership is rooted in their childhood interaction with parents. Drawing on implicit leadership theory and parental styles literature, we propose that employees are more likely to accept those leaders similar to their parents, especially those leaders whose leadership styles similar to their parents’ parental styles. Using time-lagged data from two manufacturing companies, we found that, compared with employees raised by non-authoritarian parents, employees raised by authoritarian parents had stronger affective trust in authoritarian leaders and their performances were not undermined by authoritarian leadership. We also found that employees raised by permissive parents had stronger affective trust in participative leaders and thus performed better under participative leaders than employees raised by non-permissive parents.