What good leaders actually do: micro-level leadership behaviour, leader evaluations, and team decision quality

Abstract

We supplement broad definitions of leadership behaviour with the concept of micro-level leadership behaviour, leaders’ verbal and non-verbal visible conduct and interaction. For the context of team decision-making, we identify two potentially beneficial micro-level leadership behaviours, question asking and behavioural mimicry. Specifically, we propose that under conditions of informational complexity and unshared information, participative leadership is most appropriate for team decision-making, that its effects are mediated by inquiring and empathy, and that question asking and mimicry are the behavioural micro-level manifestations of inquiring and empathy. We thus hypothesize that the effect of participative leadership on team decision quality and leader evaluation is mediated by question asking and mimicry. We conduct a laboratory experiment with student teams working on a hidden profile decision-making task and measure question asking through behavioural coding and mimicry with motion sensors. Results show that the effect of participative leadership on decision quality is mediated by question asking, and that the effect of participative leadership on leader evaluation as transformational is mediated by leaders’ behavioural mimicry and question asking. Under control of these micro-level behaviours, team decision quality and leader evaluations were unrelated.

Keywords:

• leadership
• decision-making
• teams
• interactions
• mimicry

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Corrigendum

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Marianne Schmid Mast for her valuable comments on an earlier version of the manuscript and Stephanie Scheuble for her help with collecting and coding the data. This research was partly supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Grant CR12I1_137741).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The fourth leadership behaviour that DeRue et al. (2011) identify is passive leadership, which is defined as the absence of leadership.

2. Pentland (2008) calls such behaviours honest signals. However, in contrast to his view that such micro-level behaviours are usually expressed subconsciously, we make no assumption pertaining to the consciousness or honesty of such overt behaviours.

Additional information

Funding

This research was partly supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation [grant number CR12I1_137741].