| Leaders are central causal agents within organizational contexts (Katz &Kahn, 1966), and given the discretion afforded to them by virtue of their role(Williamson, 1963), their actions can be relatively self or group-serving. Whileleadership has always been a key issue in organizational behavior, the core ofleadership research so far has mainly addressed factors affecting leadershipeffectiveness (i.e., what makes leaders able to influence and motivate followers). Oneof the things consistently shown in this research has been that leaders are moreeffective when they display group-serving behaviors, i.e. acts that show the leader scommitment to the collective and that are (perceived to be) in the interest of thiscollective (de Cremer, 2002; de Cremer & van Knippenberg, 2002, 2004; vanKnippenberg & Hogg, 2003; van Knippenberg & van Knippenberg, 2005).The popular press has also harshly criticized some leaders personal use ofcorporate jets and enjoyment of lavish severance packages and has extolled otherleaders group-serving actions (e.g., Fabrikant, 2006). There seems to be thus bothempirical evidence and a more general popular belief that on one hand, group-servingleaders are effective and are better able to motivate followers to pursue organizationalgoals and on the other hand, that self-serving leaders represent the bad apples andthat these self-interested behaviors have detrimental consequences for theorganization as well as negatively impact the leader s ability to motivate and mobilizefollowers. Given the specter of negative consequences carried by leader self-servingbehaviors, understanding what causes leaders to behave self-servingly rather thangroup-servingly is as important as understanding factors influencing leadershipeffectiveness. Thus, the question addressed in the current project, via a combinationof laboratory and field experiments, is: What factors cause more or less self-servingleader behaviors? Surprisingly, only a dearth of empirical research has investigated determinantsof leader behaviors as compared to the voluminous body of work on leadershipeffectiveness. Moreover, this research has largely focused on individual differencefactors (Bono & Judge, 2004; Chan & Drasgow, 2001; Judge, Bono, Ilies, &Gerhardt, 2002) and on factors affecting leadership development (Day, 2001; Dvir &Shamir, 2003), rather than on social-psychological processes. Furthermore, previousresearch on determinants of leader behaviors has not specifically addressed factorsdetermining relatively group or self-serving leader behaviors. Answering the abovequestion therefore is an open challenge for leadership research. The present projecttakes on this challenge by focusing on the role of leader self-definition, power andsocial information processing, in determining leader self-serving behaviors. |
