Implicit Theory of Leadership

What is leadership? Is it leaders' behavior or our image of it? For example, if you are a female manager, how often has an outsider taken you for your own secretary? How often does that happen to your male colleague? This is what research on implicit leadership theories (ILT) focuses on. What are our ideas of what a leader is like (e.g., male, as further explored later in this paragraph)? Whereas prior leadership research has studied the leader and his or her behavior, scholars studying ILT have taken a different approach. According to ILT scholars, the actual behavior or characteristics of the leader are less important for finding out what leadership is than our particular ideas about what leaders are and what characteristics or behaviors they should exhibit. It has become clear that individuals are well able to produce ideas about leaders in general, ideal leaders, effective leaders, and so on, without referring to an actual leader they know. When meeting a person labeled leader, this image of a leader in general is activated. To illustrate: Imagine you are at a party and your friend tells you that she is going to introduce you to a friend of hers who is a top leader of a Fortune 100 company. Immediately, you will have an idea about this person's attributes. For example, you might imagine this person to be male, dominant, intelligent, and so on. These characteristics do not come out of the blue. Virginia Schein has found that we often imagine leaders to be male, and recent research on the contents of our implicit leadership theories has found that characteristics such as dominant and intelligent are often named as typical for leaders.

Similarly, not only do we have ideas about leaders before or when we meet them, but, as the Robert Lord research group found, we also tend to label a person a leader who fits our ideas of a leader. This means that we are well able to say whom we believe to be the leader of a group we are observing. But we would be wise to be cautious: We can, of course, be mistaken. Leaders who do not possess “typical” leader characteristics may often mistakenly be seen as subordinates.

According to Robert Lord and colleagues, the implicit theories of leadership that are stored in our minds are often associated with the idea of success. When individuals observe a group and are given information concerning the performance of that group, they tend to remember more leadership behavior when told that the group was successful than when told the group was not successful. Remember, we are talking about different observations of exactly the same behavior, simply owing to differing information concerning group success.

Interestingly, this is a tendency we can also find on a broader societal level. James Meindl and colleagues examined newspaper articles and found that particular emphasis was put on the leader of a specific company in times when companies performed well and in times when they performed poorly. We all know this phenomenon from our daily lives: Just think about how often sports coaches are made responsible for the failure and success of their team and are, in times of failure, consequently replaced.

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