Implicit Leadership Theories

What is an Ilt?

Early research on ILTs equated them with lay theories about leadership processes. However, it was soon realized that ILTs were essentially cognitive categories and that leadership perceptions were guided by these cognitive categories. In other words, leaders were categorized as such using the same type of process involved in learning and applying other types of cognitive categories (for instance, birds, vehicles, and furniture). Categories can be defined by specific examples of category members, a perspective labeled “the exemplar view” of categories. However, when a domain becomes sufficiently familiar, categories tend to be defined in terms of a category prototype, an abstraction of characteristics common to category members. (Since most adults have extensive familiarity with leadership, prototypes are thought to underlie most leadership categorization. Thus, ILTs became equated with the leadership prototypes that allowed individuals who are familiar with leadership to classify others as leaders.

ILTs were thought to be implicit because they could be learned and used without intent and without much conscious attention. Two types of implicit processes have been shown to produce leadership perceptions based on ILTs. One relatively fast and automatic process was likened to the common categorization process that is used to recognize many types of stimuli as being category members. This recognition-based leadership perception process simply involves the automatic comparison of the features exhibited by a stimulus to a perceiver's category prototype or ILT. This leader recognition process generally occurs automatically (without conscious attention), and it allows perceivers to make very fast judgments regarding leadership. If a sufficient match occurs between a potential leader and a leadership prototype—then the target is likely to be seen as a leader. Once this prototype has been activated and used to categorize a given target, behavioral information regarding the target is assimilated with general knowledge about leadership, providing a cognitively efficient but somewhat inaccurate means of encoding and remembering leadership behavior. In fact, participants often have difficulty correctly differentiating behaviors that are actually observed from those that are simply consistent with the prototype applied to a specific leader. Leadership [Page 701]perceptions can also be formed using a second type of implicit process, an inference-based process that attributes leadership to an individual based on knowledge of their performance. Thus, perceivers may infer effective leadership based on knowledge of good performance, and knowledge of poor performance may tend to lower leadership perceptions. Although inference-based leadership perceptions make effective use of contextual information (such as the difficulty of a leadership task) in forming attributions, they need not involve conscious causal reasoning. Research has convincingly demonstrated that such inference processes are widespread by showing that knowledge of performance can impact on leadership perceptions and behavioral or groupprocess descriptions in a variety of situations—a phenomenon known as the “performance cue effect.” It is important to note that these two types of leadership processes, recognition (based on behaviors and traits) and inferential (based on knowledge of outcomes), can act together to impact our leadership judgments. Most leadership perceptions are dynamic and change over time as new characteristics of leaders are revealed or knowledge of their performance changes. Thus, both recognition-based and inferential processes can be applied to the same leader, either simultaneously in forming initial leadership perceptions or sequentially as perceptions are revised over time. For example, Roseanne Foti, Scott Fraser, and Robert Lord showed in 1982 that perceptions of the leadership of U.S. presidents changed over time, and as general leadership evaluations changed, so did the extent to which presidents were described in the prototypical terms that supported their categorization theory of leadership.

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