Abstract
What kind of person is likely to emerge as an informal leader in the workplace? Experimental research shows that high self-monitors—who tend to adjust their attitudes and behaviors to the demands of different situations—emerge as informal leaders in temporary groups. By contrast, low self-monitors—who tend to be true to themselves in terms of consistency in attitudes and behaviors across different situations—are less likely to emerge as leaders. But this prior research does not address the criticism that the emergence of high self-monitors as leaders represents ephemeral impression management in the context of laboratory experiments. To address this issue, we collected and analyzed data from a 116-member high-technology firm. Our results show that self-monitoring is related not only to leadership emergence, but also to the provision of advice to co-workers. Further, people who occupied brokerage positions (being trusted by those who did not trust each other) tended to be seen as leaders if they were high rather than low self-monitors. From these results, we build a picture of the high self-monitoring emergent leader as someone who notices problems and ameliorates them through the provision of advice and the brokerage of relationships across social divides. The occupation of a structurally advantageous position may well be more advantageous for some (i.e., high self-monitors) relative to others (i.e., low self-monitors).
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2017
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45023-0_11
Repository Citation
Kilduff, Martin; Mehra, Ajay; Gioia, Dennis A.; and Borgatti, Stephen, "Brokering Trust to Enhance Leadership: A Self-Monitoring Approach to Leadership Emergence" (2017). Management Faculty Publications. 1.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/management_facpub/1
Notes/Citation Information
Published in Knowledge and Networks. Johannes Glückler, Emmanuel Lazega, & Ingmar Hammer, (Eds.). p. 221-240.
© The Author(s) 2017
This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, duplication, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.