Implicit Leadership Prototype Match And Followership

Leadership theory has always been a hot topic in the field of organizational behavior,and the existing research on leadership theory is also very rich.Early research on leadership theory focused on the perspective of the leader center,but with the deepening of research,the leadership theory from the perspective of followers represented by implicit leadership theory has attracted wide attention.Compared with foreign studies on implicit leadership theory,domestic research is relatively scarce.The implicit leadership prototype refers to the expectation that the individual as a follower should have characteristics and behaviors for the leader,and is the criterion for the follower to distinguish between the leader and the non-leader.The implicit leadership prototype match refers to the degree to which the leader's performance in the real work matches the characteristics of the leader in the subordinate.This paper uses a two-stage questionnaire survey to measure the three variables of implicit leadership prototype match,work engagement and followership.The first stage measures the independent variable,implicit leadership prototype match,the second stage measures the mediate variable and the dependent variables,work engagement and followership.The interval between the two stages of the questionnaire is at least 10 days.After the two-stage questionnaires were collected,they were paired one by one and the invalid questionnaires were deleted.Finally,348 valid questionnaires for employees of domestic companies were obtained.Taking the obtained 348 domestic enterprise employees as a survey sample,the relationship between the implicit leadership prototype match of domestic employees and their followership to leaders was empirically tested.The empirical results show that the implicit leadership prototype match has a significant positive impact on the employee's followership;the implicit leadership prototype match has a significant positive impact on the employee's work engagement.At the same time,the employee's work engagement plays a partial mediating role between the implicit leadership prototype match and the followership.This study,through a two-stage empirical research survey,reveals the mechanism of the impact of implicit leadership prototype match on the followership of subordinates through the work engagement in the context of the followers.Specifically,the more characteristics that leaders show in their actual work are matched with the characteristics that the subordinate's expect,the higher the subordinate's recognition of the leader,the higher self-efficacy of the subordinates,and thus the more energy is putted into the work,the understanding of the work is improved,and more happiness and satisfied are obtained from the work.The improvement of work understanding and the happiness gained from work make subordinates more eager to improve their work skills.Leaders are the most direct role models for their subordinates,and their subordinates naturally improve their followership.Based on the theory of implicit leadership centered on the perspective of followers,this paper studies the impact of implicit leadership prototype match on employee work engagement and followership.It has enriched the research on the relationship between domestic leadership theories and leadership effectiveness in terms of theoretical perspectives and outcome variables.In addition,this paper considers that the research model from implicit leadership prototype match to work engagement to followership is relatively simple.It is hoped that future researchers will consider adding variables such as leadership trust and leadership member exchanges to the research model to study the multiple mediating mechanism of the influence of implicit leadership prototype match on followership;At the same time,we hope the future researchers to add the individual personality variables and the organizational feature variables,such as active personality,psychological entitlement and organizational atmosphere,to the research model to study the difference influence of implicit leadership prototype match on followership in different situations,so that the mechanism of the influence of implicit leadership prototype match on followership is more systematic and accurate.