Prototypical Leaders Do Not Always Get Our Support: Impact of Self-Uncertainty and Need for Cognition

Abstract

Social identity theory of leadership research confirms that followers prefer group prototypical to non-prototypical leaders. Drawing on uncertainty–identity theory, we argue that self-uncertainty interacts with need for cognition (NC) to influence this preference. Student participants (N = 100) reported their self-uncertainty and NC before evaluating a prospective prototypical or non-prototypical student leader. We reasoned that self-uncertainty is a cognitive demand causing low NC participants to use prototypicality as a leadership heuristic—uncertainty strengthens the leader prototypicality advantage. In contrast, high NC participants rely less on prototypicality as a heuristic—uncertainty weakens the leader prototypicality advantage. These hypotheses were supported—elevated uncertainty strengthened the leader prototypicality advantage when NC was low, but weakened it when NC was high.

Keywords::

• Leadership
• Uncertainty
• Social identity
• Prototypicality
• Need for cognition

We would like to thank Jeremy Dawson for his statistical advice and feedback about probing three-way interactions in moderated regression analyses.

Notes

^1. NC and NCC have been examined, and compared/contrasted by others (e.g., Webster & Kruglanski, 1994), as have NCC and self-uncertainty (Hogg, 2007). We do not wish to add to this discussion. Need for cognitive closure is an epistemic motivation related to one's desire for order, rules, stability, and predictability. This is different from our conceptualization of NC and self-uncertainty, and we do not wish to further discuss the relationship between these variables.