Extending Our Understanding of How Follower Political Skill Influences Leadership Ratings
通过实验和实地研究，发现政治技能高的追随者会更高评价变革型领导行为，部分原因是他们感知到工具性，这提醒实践者和研究者注意追随者特征对领导力评估的影响。
We explored the role of followers’ political skill in the appraisal of leadership behaviors. We discovered across several experimental vignette-based studies that politically skilled participants reported higher ratings of transformational leadership behaviors regardless of what type of leader behavior they were presented with. In efforts to explain this unexpected discovery, we turned to the meta-analytic framework of political skill to examine the mechanisms through which political skill may be associated with ratings of leaders’ behaviors. Results from an additional field study suggest that followers’ instrumentality perceptions in part explain the positive associations between followers’ political skill and their ratings of transformational leadership behaviors. With these discoveries, we extend our understanding of how follower characteristics influence leadership evaluations, thereby contributing to both the political skill and broader leadership literature. Practitioners and researchers alike may benefit from considering these deliberate and inadvertent influences when they rely on followers’ assessments of their leaders.