The Cognitive Structure And Influence Factors Of Implicit Leadership Theories

Implicit Leadership Theories (ILTs) refer to the expectations and beliefs a person holds about leaders' traits or behavior. They are 'internal labels' in individuals to identify leaders and non-leaders, effective leaders and ineffective ones. According to the opinions of imformation proccessing, ILTs are cognitive structure or cognitive classification system formed through the application of cognitive resources such as perception, attention, coding and memory. They are stored in persons' memory, and activated when combined with specific leaders or leadership circumstance. Being the basic elements of perception organization, ILTs can also give us better understanding for leadership behaviors.As for ILTs, former researchers focused their attention on the contents, structure, measurement and the consistency across demographics variables. The researches may include those studies conducted by Lord, Offermann, House, Epitropaki and Martin, which obtained important and rich outcomes. Dispute the various conclusions made by different reseachers, many agree that the contents and structure of ILTs are rather culturally and nationally connected. By far, the researches on ILTs in China are comparatively scarce, the theory and application of which needs more futher exploration.On the basis of reviewing, this study aims to explore the contents, structure, concordance, influences and priming effect of Chinese's ILTs. It mainly includes as follows:First, factor analysis of this study shows eight factors in Chinese's ILTs, which contains morals, interpersonal sensitivity, job inspiring, job drive, intelligence, attraction, autocracy and male, using self-compiled inventories. These factors can be further converged into two: prototype and antiprototype. Those eight factors are probably in a continuous model.Second, the study check the implicitness of prototype and antiprototype in ILTs through Implicit Association Test (IAT). It shows that the prototypes in the schema of ideal leaders and effective leaders are more implicit, while antiprototypes in that of ineffective leaders are more implicit.Third, the analysis of demographics variables indicates that there are specific difference in heterogeneous groups, despite the continuity existed in the factor structure of ILTs.Fourth, this research study the influence of personality , parental characteristics and personal attributional styles on ILTs. The result is that morals, interpersonal sensitivity, job inspiring, attraction and autocracy in ILTs can be well predicated by agreeableness, conscientiousness and extroversion in 'Big Five'. Some characteristics of parents can also predict ILTs. Apart from these, personal optimism/negatism, active/negative attributional style have influence on ILTs, too.Fifth, in the priming effect of ILTs we find that performance cue affect traits evaluation on excellent, ordinary and bad leaders, especially for the evaluation on positive traits, while there is no remarkable priming effect difference between ordinary and bad leaders. Besides, the measurement of latency shows the longer reaction time of evaluation on bad leaders, and the shorter reation time of prototype traits of ideal leaders.Finally, the influence of China's national culture on ILTs, and the relationship between implicit leadership theory and explicit ones are also been discussed. We then present two directions in both theory and application for future study.