The Structure, Antecedents, And Effects Of The Follower Archetype

Implicit followership theories(IFTs)refer to the expectations and beliefs a person about followers’ traits or behavior that all people may have.IFTs can influence individuals’ judgment and behavior unconsciously.As for IFTs,former researchers focused their attention on the contents,structure,measurement and the consistency across demographics variables.Dispute the various conclusions made by different researchers,many agree that the contents and structure of IFTs are rather culturally and nationally connected.By far,the researches on IFTs in China are comparatively scarce,the theory and application of which needs more further exploration.This study aims to explore content and structure of Chinese leaders and followers’IFTs respectively,compare their difference and find out the impact on leadership and followers’ behavior.First,exploratory factor analysis of this study shows two factors both in leaders and followers’ IFTs,which contains prototype and antiprototype.The confirmatory factor analysis shows that the two factor model fits well.Second,the study check the implicitness of prototype and antiprototype in followers’ IFTs through GANT.It shows that the prototypes in the sehema of followers are more implicit than antiprototypes.Third,this research study the consequence of followers’ IFTs and the influence of organizational culture,locus of control on leaders’ IFTs.The result is that followers’ IFTs positively relate to job engagement and colleague relationship quality.However,leaders’IFTs can be well predicated by organizational culture and leaders’locus of control.