Implicit Leadership and Followership Theories and Interpersonal Attraction in Workplace Relationships: A Factorial Survey Among Job Sharers

Implicit leadership and followership theories (ILTs/IFTs) play an important role for judgements and decisions in organizational settings. We focus on espoused ILTs and IFTs (i.e. assumptions about leadership and followership that someone claims to have) and examine their influence on other-perceived attractiveness for building professional relations at the workplace. Data wasere collected in a factorial survey (N = 178) in which prospective and actual job sharers were exposed to short profiles of fictive partners. Results of multi-level modelling tend to confirm that leadership and followership prototypes are positively related to attractiveness regarding job sharing, while the opposite holds for antiprototypes. As the first study to examine ILTs and IFTs simultaneously, we find that espoused IFTs exert a considerably stronger influence on interpersonal attraction than ILTs. Moreover, we provide evidence on how the valence of prototypes can shift from positive to negative depending on the context. Finally, implications for leadership theory and the matchmaking process for job sharing are discussed.