Implicit leadership theories: Defining leaders described as worthy of influence

It is proposed that followers' implicit leadership theories for appointed and elected leaders considered worthy of influence consist of expectations organized around category prototypes. An assessment of college students' leader prototypes yielded 14 key appointed leader behaviors and 19 key elected leader behaviors. Subsequent investigations provided evidence for the existence of this leader category. Participants, for whom a leader-worthy-of-influence category was suggested, seemed to rely on associated prototypes during a leader behavior recognition task. They selectively recognized category-consistent information more than did a control group. Results are discussed with relation to the synthesis of the universal and situation-contingent behavior and trait approaches for predicting leadership effectiveness, leader selection and training, and cross-situational comparisons of leader selection and training, and cross-situational comparisons of leader categorizations.