Followers that lead: Relating leadership emergence through follower commitment, engagement, and connectedness

This three-phase convergent mixed methods study was designed to assess the multivariate relationships among organizational commitment, organizational engagement, connectedness of organizational members, and emergent leadership behavior in a local community of faith. The first phase was a small set of initial interview questions used to establish the behaviors and activities that promote relationships in the organization. The second phase was a survey used to preform a social network analysis to establish social network measures from relationship data in the church as well as measure the multivariate associations between the dependent and independent variables. The final phase was a more substantial set of interviews to determine and evaluate the leadership narrative in the local congregation. This study showed that organizational engagement, particularly the absorption subscale, displayed a strong correlation with emergent leadership behavior while organizational commitment surprisingly only showed a small positive correlation. Relationships in the church displayed homophilic behavior where organizational members with similar measures in organizational commitment and engagement created or maintained social relationships with each other. But, no homophilic behavior was demonstrated in emergent leadership behavior. The leadership narrative of the church revealed the importance of commitment, engagement, and prototypicality in leaders. Organizational members would give or restrict support based on prototypicality thus emerging leaders are socially encouraged or discouraged to continue developing as leaders.