Discuss1

Implications of dispositional and process views of traits for individual difference research in leadership

Jessica E. Dinh ⁎, Robert G. Lord 1

Department of Psychology, University of Akron, Akron, OH 44325-4301, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Available online 4 April 2012 This article assesses the conceptual and methodological limitations associated with traditional dis- positional approaches to personality and leadership, and it proposes that more process-oriented approaches will better enable leadership research to explore emergent leadership phenomena such as perception and effectiveness. By reconceptualizing the structure of the self as a dynamic, but stable entity, we maintain that an explicit focus on events as a fundamental level of analysis is needed, which will help reduce the inaccuracies of aggregate retrospective leadership measures that collapse across different situations and time. Event-level research methodologies can also help account for the effects that situational contingencies have on leader behavioral flexibility, the development of leadership skills, and leadership emergence within shared or distributive leadership structures.

Published by Elsevier Inc.

Keywords: Leadership perception Leadership behavior Process approaches Dispositional approaches Intrapersonal dynamics

1. Dispositional versus process views of traits

Research on individual differences shares intimate ties with leadership research, and over the years, many studies have examined how various traits and individual difference attributes, such as the Big Five dimensions of personality or cognitive and emotional intel- ligence, relate to the perception and performance of leaders (Day, in press; Kirkpatrick & Locke, 1991). Collectively referred to as trait theories, dispositional approaches to leadership assumed that great leaders could be characterized by specific traits and attributes (e.g., intelligence, honesty), and consequently, these theories focused on identifying individual difference variables that had the highest correlation with leadership emergence and measures of effectiveness (Day, in press; Judge & Long, 2012; Zaccaro, Kemp, & Bader, 2004).

Although dispositional views of leadership dominated early trait research (Day, in press; Zaccaro et al., 2004), process- oriented perspectives have more recently emerged alongside new developments in networking models of personality (Mischel & Shoda, 1998; Read et al., 2010). In general, whereas dispositional approaches to leadership emphasize that important leadership outcomes, such as effectiveness and emergence, can be predicted by stable individual characteristics or traits; process approaches place greater emphasis on understanding how the interaction among intrapersonal mental structures and processes could influ- ence perception and generate behavior in a more flexible manner (Lord, Brown, Harvey, & Hall, 2001; Mischel & Shoda, 1998; Shoda, Tiernan, & Mischel, 2002).

Evidence of such behavioral variability can be illustrated by Fleeson (2001), who used experience sampling methodologies to demonstrate that there was just as much within- as between-person variability in the behaviors that manifest as the Big Five traits of personality, and that such variation occurred throughout the course of a day. In addition, research on one's active self- concept or identity also contributes to our understanding of behavioral variability. In fact, Markus and Wurf (1987) maintain that behavior is closely regulated by one's working self-concept (WSC), which is the currently active part of a much larger, mul- tifaceted self-structure. Because the WSC varies with contexts, roles, and different social relations (Andersen & Chen, 2002;

The Leadership Quarterly 23 (2012) 651–669

⁎ Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 330 972 7018. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (J.E. Dinh), [email protected] (R.G. Lord).

1 Tel.: +1 330 972 7018.

1048-9843/$ – see front matter. Published by Elsevier Inc. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2012.03.003

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McConnell, 2011), behavior can be more varied than dispositional approaches imply. This occurs as different WSC constrains how leaders (and followers) selectively process information (Johnson & Lord, 2010; van Knippenberg, van Knippenberg, De Cremer, & Hogg, 2004), and how different goals and behaviors emerge (Lord, Diefendorff, Schmidt, & Hall, 2010). Indeed, leaders with great- er self-complexity are thought to be better able to flexibly adjust to changing social and task demands (Hannah, Lord, & Pearce, 2011; Hooijberg, Hunt, & Dodge, 1997). Interestingly, self-structures can operate implicitly as well as explicitly (Johnson & Lord, 2010), and thus, can affect behavioral variability in ways of which people are unaware.

In short, process perspectives can help explain the large within-person variance in behavior that is related to the dimensions of personality (Fleeson, 2001), as well as the dynamic processes that underlie the activation of different parts of one's self- concept. When applied to leadership, process perspectives can offer valuable insight regarding leadership flexibility to different contexts (Boal & Hooijberg, 2001; Carmeli & Halevi, 2009; Read et al., 2010; Tett & Burnett, 2003; Zaccaro, 2007), and help further our understanding of how important individual differences and intrapersonal structures, such as personality and self-identity, re- late to leadership. Hence, process perspectives can clarify how leaders and followers can reciprocally influence the self-regulatory structures, goals, and affect of the other to influence one's identity as a leader, skill development, and ways in which leaders (and followers) process contextual information. As we will discuss, greater awareness of this approach can also provide a theoretical foundation for researchers and practitioners to develop new techniques for assessing how intrapersonal structures and processes can change with events, and how these dynamic structures can subsequently influence important leadership outcomes, such as leadership emergence and effectiveness.

In developing this perspective, we make the following contributions to the literature. First, we build a case that process approaches will better enable leadership researchers to explore emergent phenomena such as leadership perceptions and a leader's ability to adapt to dynamic, changing environments. Second, by moving towards a process view of personality (and leadership), we will also highlight the importance of understanding leadership phenomena at the level of events, which we define as a time-bounded episode that hap- pens at a certain place within a specific interval of time. Events can range from simple, but notable routine leader–team activities (e.g., Marks, Mathieu, & Zaccaro, 2001; Morgeson, DeRue, & Karam, 2010), to severe organizational disruptions or change (e.g., Balogun & Johnson, 2004; Plowman, Baker, Kulkarni, Solansky, & Travis, 2007). Events can also be defined by features such as being ordinary or unique (e.g., Ballinger & Rockmann, 2010; Carpenter & Grossberg, 2003; Wood, Quinn, & Kashy, 2002).

Third, jointly emphasizing process approaches and events helps provide a practical and research-oriented perspective that explicitly considers the qualitative and quantitative richness of exploring event-level phenomena. For instance, disruptive events often require specific leadership interventions even when groups are organized to be self-leading (Morgeson, 2005; Morgeson et al., 2010). Conse- quently, understanding event-level leadership in conjunction with process views of personality allows us to develop more refined the- ories of leadership. Fourth, events provide unique kinds of leadership experiences that can fundamentally change a leader's developmental trajectory (Day, 2012), and leaders experience different kinds of events over time (Carmeli & Halevi, 2009; Morgeson et al., 2010). Therefore, understanding how leaders interpret, respond to, and learn from different events can help advance theories of leadership, as well as research on leader skill development and how one's identity as a leader develops over time. Additionally, analysis of leadership at the event-level may also help explain how leaders affect the performance of larger entities such as groups or organiza- tions. Finally, accurate behavioral measurement is a cornerstone of scientific theories of leadership, which we suggest will be enhanced by event-level measurement methodologies (Shondrick, Dinh, & Lord, 2010).

In the sections that follow, we will briefly discuss the limitations of dispositional views of leadership, elaborate on what we mean by an event-level of analysis, and finally, draw upon networking models of the personality (Mischel & Shoda, 1998) and leader complexity (Hannah, Woolfolk, & Lord, 2009; Lord, Hannah, & Jennings, 2011) to provide a foundation for understanding the implications of recent process perspectives. We believe that attention to these issues, with a specific focus at the level of events, provides a needed counterpoint to extant work in leadership that focuses on a person-level of analysis. We also critique typical leadership research practices that rely on collecting retrospective accounts of work-related experiences as these research practices overlook the details necessary to understand event-level leadership phenomena.

2. Early trait theories and dispositional approaches to leadership

Early trait theories and dispositional approaches to leadership assumed that what differentiated great leaders from non- leaders stemmed from inborn traits and qualities that were stable and enduring over time (Bass & Stogdill, 1990; Judge & Long, 2012; Kirkpatrick & Locke, 1991; Stogdill, 1974). These perspectives dominated much of early leadership research, and over the years, several publications have described the contributions from this line of work, as well as provided in-depth historical reviews on the rise and fall of leadership trait perspectives (see Day, in press; Zaccaro et al., 2004). Because our purpose is not to provide a detailed review of trait theory, we will only highlight a few notable findings from this and related lines of work.

Historically, research on social cognition suggests that people make automatic trait inferences or dispositional attributions based on the behavior and physical attributes of others (e.g., faces, age, and gender) to help understand and explain the causes of their behavior (Fiske & Taylor, 2008). From an information processing standpoint, the ability to form rapid inferences based on another's dispositional traits helps reduce the amount of information perceivers must process to form social judgments like gauging the leadership abilities of others. Moreover, by assuming that traits are stable, recollections of an individual's past behavior can be used by perceivers to predict (correctly or incorrectly) the person's future actions, which reduces uncertainty in one's social world. In- deed, research on traits and their relationship to leadership has found solid evidence for individual difference effects in leadership per- ceptions and effectiveness through the use of meta-analysis (Judge, Bono, Ilies, & Gerhardt, 2002), and experiments using rotational designs. Kenny, Zaccaro, and colleagues for instance, used rotational designs and analyses to decompose variance in dependent variables

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into leader, rater, and leader by rater interactions, and found that most of the variance in leadership perceptions was indeed associated with the leader (Kenny & Zaccaro, 1983; Zaccaro, Foti, & Kenny, 1991). More recently, Kenney and Livi (2009) analyzed rotation designs from seven studies of short-term ad hoc groups using a procedure that decomposes variance in leadership perceptions into stable and unstable variances that are associated with targets and perceivers. In these analyses, stable variance pertains to effects that generalize across different leadership measures. They found that stable target (leader) effects explained an average of 43% of the variance in lead- ership ratings. In addition, Hall, Lord, and Foster (2009) applied this procedure to groups that had interacted for an extended period of time and defined the stable component as the effects of using the same measure at multiple time periods. Similar to Kenny and Livi, they found that 48% of the variance in leadership perceptions was associated with stable target effects.

This line of research also provides specific examples of the traits and dispositional characteristics that are associated with leader- ship emergence and leadership effectiveness. Judge et al. (2002), for instance, used meta-analytic techniques across 73 independent samples that linked one or more dimensions of the 5-factor model of personality to leadership. This research is notable for its care in distinguishing between leadership emergence (i.e., the perception of being leader-like) and leadership effectiveness (i.e., a leader's effect on performance). Their results show that individually, extroversion demonstrated the strongest correlation with leadership emergence, which was followed by conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness. Thus, of the five dimensions, only agreeableness was found to be unrelated to leadership emergence, but all five were related to leadership effectiveness. Additionally, when all five factors were assessed together, they report an overall, multiple correlation of .53 with emergence and .39 with effectiveness — a strong indication of the association between the Big Five dimensions of personality and leadership. Other studies have shown that individuals with high emotional intelligence, self-efficacy, dominance, and cognitive ability were more likely to emerge and be rated as effective leaders over time (Foti & Hauenstein, 2007; Judge, Colbert, & Ilies, 2004; Kellet, Humphrey, & Sleeth, 2002, 2006).

Together, the results noted above show substantiated individual difference effects in leadership perceptions and effectiveness. From an applied and theoretical perspective, dispositional approaches offer parsimony in understanding the relationship between leadership and leader-outcomes, which in turn, have had an enormous influence in leadership selection and developmental prac- tices (Thompson, Grahek, Phillips, & Fay, 2008; Wood & Vilkinas, 2007). Indeed, a dispositional approach implies that leaders should be selected according to their level on certain traits (e.g., high extraversion, low neuroticism).

However, there are many factors that may moderate and mediate the relation of traits to outcome variables (DeRue, Nahrgang, Wellman, & Humphrey, 2011; Judge & Long, 2012; Meyer, Dalal, & Hermida, 2010), and how a particular person actually leads may vary with their tenure and position in a particular organization (Hambrick & Fukutomi, 1991; Katz & Kahn, 1978), or with the complexity of a leader's organizational environment (Uhl-Bien & Marion, 2009). In fact, the literature on organizational com- plexity illustrates the need for organizations to continually innovate to meet the demands of changing external environments, and this need requires that leaders go beyond merely applying their extant knowledge and traits to achieve personal and/or or- ganizational goals and objectives. For instance, leadership effectiveness in adaptive organizations or work teams may depend on the leader's ability to create new emergent structures (e.g., self-regulatory processes, goal orientations, creative thoughts and ideas) in the self and others to flexibly adapt their behaviors to the complexities created by their environments (Hannah et al., 2011; Lord et al., 2010; Uhl-Bien & Marion, 2009).

From this perspective, the appeal of dispositional approaches may be limited when our goal is to understand how dynamic intra- personal processes can affect leadership perception and performance as leaders adjust to a wide array of organizational tasks and so- cial situations. These goals may be important as modern organizations become increasingly complex and global (Osland, 2010), requiring leaders to coordinate new needs with existing structures, sensemake, and influence others; while flexibly adapting to changing organizational systems, team dynamics, and workforces (Boal & Hooijberg, 2001; Carmeli & Halevi, 2009; Katz & Kahn, 1978; Kozlowski, Watola, Jensen, Kim, & Botero, 2009; Morgeson et al., 2010; Uhl-Bien & Marion, 2009). It is during these periods of change that leaders are likely to emerge and influence the direction of organizations (Katz & Kahn, 1978), and as we will discuss, obtaining a clearer understanding of such dynamic leadership processes requires a finer grain of analysis that considers events and specific points in time (Day, 2012). Although we note that there are important differences between dispositional and more process views, it is also important to recognize that each provides valuable insight into leadership. Hence, the two approaches should not be viewed as being mutually exclusive, but rather as two different, yet valid approaches to leadership research.

3. Mediation of dispositional effects by skills or leader behavior

From a theoretical perspective, dispositional approaches to leadership assumed that stable individual characteristics (traits) produce leadership behavior, which in turn, affects subsequent leadership outcomes such as perception and effectiveness. Addi- tionally, this approach also assumed that a leader's style or behavioral tendency is stable across situations, and that these leader- ship styles generally have consistent influences on outcomes. As demonstrated in Fig. 1, this conceptualization can be represented by a trait to outcome relationship, c, that can then be decomposed into a trait to behavior effect, a, and a behavior to outcome effect, b. In other words, leadership skills and behaviors serve as mediators of individual difference effects (DeRue et al., 2011; Zaccaro et al., 2004). By conceptualizing the relation of traits to leadership outcomes in this way, it is apparent that the product ab equals c, but the effects of a are within a person, and b's effects involve the leader's task or social environment. Therefore, one problem that arises from dispositional views is that simply examining the total effect (from a meditational standpoint) or the re- lation of individual differences to outcomes, c, ignores the distinction between processes that are internal to a leader, and process- es that involve the external environment.

Decomposing dispositional effects into two parts (an internal person effect and an external environmental effect) also high- lights three additional issues. First, the relation of traits to behaviors, a, may not be stable across situations as implied within

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processes views of personality (Shoda et al., 2002) or theories of self-complexity (Hannah et al., 2009; Lord et al., 2011). As we have described previously, a leader's effectiveness in dynamic situations requires that they enact different (but appropriate) be- havioral responses in order to meet the demands of changing external environments or influence group processes. Second, the nature of the behavior to outcome relationship, b, may vary with the complexity of the situation. As such, paths a or b could both serve as consistent (or variable) inputs that affect the consistency (or variability) of a leader's performance. Third, modeling this meditational process will be highly sensitive to the adequacy with which leader behavior is measured since behavior is in- volved in estimating both paths a and b. Therefore, even moderate unreliability of leader behavioral measures will attenuate the estimates of the indirect paths, and can result in making erroneous conclusions regarding mediation, and the direct effects of individual difference variables (Hall & Usher-Perez, 2011). These issues apply both to understanding leadership effectiveness and leadership perceptions, and for this reason in the following discussion, we use the term leader outcomes to reflect both types of dependent variables.

As we have illustrated in Fig. 1, it is clear that variability in trait–outcome relations, c, needs to be decomposed into two parts: (a) be- havioral variability effects and (b) behavior–outcome effects. In other words, concerns with moderators of the overall relationship, c, needs to specify whether it is the path from traits to behaviors, a, or the path from behaviors to outcomes, b, that is affected by moder- ators. This distinction is crucial because the dynamics related to moderation may differ depending on whether the focus is path a or path b. As an example of this distinction, consider the dynamics associated with path a. Individuals may assume different roles and identities when specific experiences activate different portions of one's self-concept, which facilitates access to different knowledge structures and ways of processing contextual information (Kuhnen, Hannover, & Schubert, 2001; Lord & Hall, 2005; McConnell, 2011). For example, by incorporating inclusive pronouns into a leader's speech (e.g., ‘we’ rather than ‘me’), leaders can activate semantic knowledge structures associated with a collective or an interdependent self-identity (vs. an independent self-identity) that encourages holistic rather than context-independent forms of information processing (Kuhnen et al., 2001). Holistic interpretive processing can in turn, help broaden one's perspective to include context, fostering the generation of innovative behavioral responses to different contexts. In the same way, followers may influence how leaders behave by activating different leadership self-identities and knowledge structures through their interactions with their leader. Indeed, the literature on leader–member differentiation suggests that there are qualitative differences in the relationship quality leaders can have with different members (i.e., high or low quality) (Chang & Johnson, 2010; Erdogan & Bauer, 2010). Consequently, because leaders employ very different social identities when interacting with particular individuals (Andersen & Chen, 2002), how leaders behave may also vary with whom they are interacting. Referring to Fig. 1, this process represents moderation at path a (traits→behaviors).

Focusing on path b (behaviors→outcomes) highlights different situational contingencies. For instance, a leader's performance might decline when encountering a particularly complex and demanding situation that taxes one's available cognitive, affective, and attentional resources (Beal, Weiss, Barros, & MacDermid, 2005; DeRue & Wellman, 2009). This can occur when leaders must simultaneously manage multiple competing goals or engage in tasks that are anxiety provoking, because these kinds of tasks de- plete the brain's metabolic energy resources and interfere with one's ability to self-regulate and effectively process information (Eysenck, Derakshan, Santos, & Calvo, 2007; Gailliot et al., 2007).

Although traditional dispositional approaches offer great parsimony in understanding how leaders generally behave, we suggest that the typical failure to separate within-person effects and external effects on leadership outcomes presents several limitations with this per- spective. One limitation relates to the general absence of dispositional research that examines the within-person differences in the trait– leadership behavior relationship. As we will argue, intrapersonal variability across situations has important consequences for understanding leadership processes, which implies that leadership might be best understood at the event, rather than at the person-level of analysis. An- other limitation is rooted in the measurements used to assess traits and other individual difference variables. As Shondrick et al. (2010) sug- gest, these types of measures frequently ask respondents to indicate how leaders generally behave, and therefore, may lack utility in situations that are non-routine or dynamic (e.g., Carmeli & Halevi, 2009; Uhl-Bien & Marion, 2009). Under these situations, different factors may moderate paths a and path b, and thus change the relation of traits to leadership outcomes. Finally, when we consider that there are typically two types of dependent variables that are used as criteria in leadership research (i.e., leadership perceptions and leadership per- formance; Kaiser, Hogan, & Craig, 2008), additional problems can emerge from a dispositional viewpoint because the nature of this medi- ation by behavior is different for leadership perceptions than for leadership performance outcomes. We will elaborate on these issues in the following sections.

Individual Differences

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Fig. 1. Alternative perspectives linking individual differences to leadership outcomes.

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4. Difficulties with dispositional approaches in understanding leadership processes

4.1. Moderators and their effects on leadership perception

If we consider the relationship between leaders and followers, leadership is not strictly limited to the actions of a single indi- vidual (Day, 2000; Pearce & Conger, 2003). Rather, it is a social process that involves an amalgamation of social interactions amongst a collection of agents, which shapes how leaders are perceived and evaluated (DeRue & Ashford, 2010). From a follower viewpoint, leadership effectiveness, and even the decision to identify an individual as a leader, is generated by a follower's active construal of the leader and situation (Brown, Scott, & Lewis, 2004; DeRue & Ashford, 2010; Lord & Maher, 1991). Of importance for our purpose is how these dynamic processes can moderate the relationship between leadership behaviors and leadership per- ceptions, which we have illustrated in Fig. 1.

According to social–cognitive theories and implicit theories of leadership (Shondrick et al., 2010), social perceptions depend on implicit informational processing systems where perceptual information is categorized and matched according to existing schemas and prototypes (Lord, De Vader, & Alliger, 1986). Prototypes and schemas can be defined as abstract collections of attri- butes and qualities that characterize a group or category type (Lord, 1985). The importance of prototypes lies in the fact that human processing capacities are limited, and consequently, people pay attention to the patterns of traits or behaviors that are reflected in a particular prototype, rather than process each element individually (Foti & Hauenstein, 2007; Smith & Foti, 1998). In this way, one's expectation or perception of a leader can be shaped by a prototype's ability to “fill in” prototype- consistent information (e.g., a leader as someone who is tall, Caucasian, and is male). Thus, although reliance on prototypes allow perceivers to devote their cognitive resources to process other elements in the environment, such as information needed to perform group tasks (Brown et al., 2004; DeRue & Wellman, 2009; Fiske & Taylor, 2008), this process also provides individuals with a general framework that can guide one's perception as to what defines a leader (Lord, Foti, & De Vader, 1984), as well as expectations for, and memory of leadership.

As we have previously discussed, several traits and individual characteristics are common among leadership prototypes (one's image of a typical leader), including intelligence, kindness, honesty, and charisma (Lord et al., 1984). However, recent research also suggests that more embodied aspects of the person, including one's facial structure, tone of voice, body posture, and physical height, are included within leadership prototypes (Giessner & Schubert, 2007; Huang, Galinsky, Gruenfeld, & Guillory, 2011; Menon, Sim, Fu, Chiu, & Hong, 2010; Wong, Ormiston, & Haselhuhn, 2011). Of the prototypical leadership traits identified, evi- dence from Lord et al.'s (1986) meta-analysis suggests that perceived intelligence is most strongly correlated with leadership per- ception, and is therefore, a crucial attribute in most leadership prototypes. Recent findings also support the relationship between intelligence and both leadership emergence and effectiveness (Judge et al., 2004), which may be perhaps unsurprising if one con- siders the complex roles leaders have in modern day organizations (Kirkpatrick & Locke, 1991).

The connection between traits and prototypes becomes important in understanding leadership perception when we consider that prototypes provide a mechanism by which a leader's behavior is interpreted and generalized by others (Lord, 1985). Although the pro- cess of perceiving a leader appears to be straightforward by requiring that a simple match be made between a target and a leadership prototype, theories of perceiver mental structures suggest that leadership perception is far more complex. This is because the structure of leadership prototypes appears to operate like a connectionist network where traits are each represented as nodes that are connected to other closely related traits (or nodes) by systems of network pathways. In this way, leadership prototypes are dynamically derived and can be adjusted to many contextual features upon use (e.g., organizational culture, task characteristics, and characteristics of the perceiver) as sensory input causes different sets of nodes to become active (Foti, Knee, & Backert, 2008; Hanges, Lord, & Dickson, 2000; Lord et al., 2001). The result is that across different situations, certain individuals may be more (or less) likely to emerge as leaders based on how contextual features constrain which parts of the connectionist network becomes active or suppressed (Lord et al., 2001; see also Sy et al., 2010). In a competitive environment, for instance, leadership prototypes may center more on individual char- acteristics that emphasize ‘dominance’ and ‘aggression.’ However, in contexts that center on cooperation, a different type of leadership prototype may become active — e.g., one that views traits such as being ‘sensitive’ and ‘generous’ as being important leadership characteristics.

It is important to note that although the reconstruction of a leadership prototype may exhibit variability when different con- textual cues cause different network activation patterns to emerge, leadership prototypes may also exhibit stability within a par- ticular kind of event as familiar perceptual cues are experienced. This concept is represented in Fig. 2, which shows how different events can activate different identities, self-regulatory structures, goals, and affect, as indicated as shaded nodes. This configura- tion of nodes can in turn, activate different leadership prototypes which influence leadership perceptions. Thus, Fig. 2 connects both intrapersonal perceptual processes and interpersonal leadership emergence processes. It also illustrates in a more concrete way how path b in Fig. 1 can change with events.

Such a model suggests that paying attention to differences in the way that leadership perceptions are reconstructed helps ex- plain why the same individual may be perceived as a leader in one type of situation or event, but not in the next due to the changes in the patterning of a perceiver's leadership prototype. The sensitivity of perceiver perceptual constructs to context also explains why perceivers might endorse different kinds of leaders as events or situations change (Sy et al., 2010), allowing for more flexible, adaptive social dynamics. This idea complements the value of process views of traits in explaining the flexibility in generating leadership behavior as shown in Fig. 3. The critical difference however, is that the former perceptual example of leader emergence is an effect external to the potential leader, whereas, the latter behavioral effect is internal to the leader (i.e., how path a in Fig. 1 could change with different events).

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4.2. Moderators and their effects on effectiveness

The relationship between leadership behavior and effectiveness is also likely to be moderated by many factors. This is because leaders are embedded within the context of the task and organizational system (Zaccaro et al., 2004), and as such, are affected by the events that occur within their organizational environment. These situational effects have long been recognized in the leader- ship field as “contingency effects” (Fiedler, 1964; Kerr, Schriesheim, Murphy, & Stogdill, 1974), which refers to the idea that the

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Fig. 2. Activation of leader prototypes (dominance, extroversion, decisive, intelligent, masculine, and flexible) from behavioral input and contextual constraints within a multilevel connectionist network for different events. (Activated nodes are shaded in gray).

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Fig. 3. Activation of dynamic intrapersonal structures from varied contextual cues within multilevel connectionist networks influences leader performance levels. (Activated nodes are shaded in gray).

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relation of specific leadership characteristics or behaviors to performance varies across situations. In fact, the classical studies on the Ohio State leadership scales of Consideration and Initiating Structure (see Kerr et al., 1974) and empirical work on Cognitive Resource Theory (CRT; see Fiedler & Garcia, 1987) each demonstrate that the relation of behavior to performance (path b in Fig. 1) varied across situations. More recently, Meyer, Dalal, and Bonaccio (2009) show that although conscientiousness is frequently uti- lized as a distal predictor of job performance, its predictive validity varied depending on whether the situation was ‘strong’ or ‘weak’, where strong situations can reduce the criterion-related validity of individual differences by restricting (or homogenizing) the expression of personality, and thereby its effects on behavior (see also Meyer et al., 2010). For instance, strong situations may have clearly defined behavioral scripts that automatically direct behavior when specific situations occur (Gioia & Poole, 1984). In weaker situations however, there may be greater latitude in how one chooses to pursue their goals and objectives. This effect is shown clearly by Reis, Sheldon, Gable, Roscoe, and Ryan (2000), who used event-level sampling methodologies among college students to examine situational effects on behavior. They found that although individual differences in autonomy-needs satisfac- tion influenced how students strived to fulfill their needs (e.g., socializing to fulfill interpersonal needs), the occurrence of these behaviors varied across the work week, occurring the most over the weekend where they were less constrained by strong work schedules. The significance of these works is that they imply a moderated link between individual differences (e.g., intelligence, personality) and leadership outcomes, rather than a stable direct influence of individual differences to outcome (i.e., path c in Fig. 1). They also illustrate the importance of event-level methodologies and process approaches for understanding the intrapersonal dynamics of motivational striving and the variability in how traits become manifested as behaviors at different points in time, such as across the work week (Dalal & Hulin, 2008; Reis et al., 2000).

Studies also show that different types of situations and work-related experiences can affect leadership skill development, and thereby act as moderators for how a leader's experience translates into effective leadership performance. In fact, DeRue and Wellman (2009) found that when leaders were exposed to challenging work experiences that required them to analyze and think through complex problems, leaders learned more and demonstrated better work performance as they acquired new cogni- tive scripts and task strategies. However, when work challenges became too difficult, learning and performance declined as leaders became emotionally and cognitively overwhelmed. It is also worth noting that leaders must manage multiple competing tasks in their daily routines, and whether leaders can accomplish their tasks may depend upon dynamic intrapersonal processes such as one's performance expectations for completing multiple tasks simultaneously (i.e., self-efficacy), current affect (e.g., anx- iety, frustration), and/or progress judgments (Schmidt & Dolis, 2009; Schmidt, Dolis, & Tolli, 2009; Seo, Barrett, & Bartunek, 2010). As such, events do not have uniform effects on leadership skill development or performance because the strength of a situation and the types of challenges that a leader may experience can vary widely from one moment to the next (Kozlowski et al., 2009; Meyer et al., 2010; Morgeson et al., 2010). In terms of our framework, these examples show that one has to examine the nature of an event, and the processes that underlie how leaders respond to different events, to understand how individual differ- ences (e.g., intelligence, experience, and goal orientations) relate to leadership performance.

In short, the research reviewed above shows that the relationship between individual differences and leadership outcomes is com- plex, and it raises the question of what types of processes leaders might use to assess their situational demands and flexibly draw on their intelligence and experience to contingently alter their leadership behaviors (Boal & Hooijberg, 2001; Kozlowski et al., 2009; Morgeson et al., 2010). Our belief is that process perspectives are needed to further our knowledge as to how traits relate to leader performance, and Fig. 3 is consistent with our argument that leadership needs to be considered at an event-level. This process- oriented view of personality and self-complexity can also help build upon the limited research on leadership behavioral flexibility — i.e., a leader's ability to recognize, interpret, and adapt new solutions that are appropriate to the context (Mumford, Zaccaro, Harding, Jacobs, & Fleishman, 2000; Zaccaro et al., 1991). Although studies have shown that certain traits like self-monitoring appear to facilitate behavioral flexibility (Hall, Workman, & Marchioro, 1998), we need a more comprehensive system for thinking about the flexibility of leadership behavior and the flexible use of individual (or group) resources in responding to leadership demands. As de- scribed in the following section, this system is better provided by process views of personality, which explain how stable processing structures, coupled with dynamic intrapersonal processes, are capable of producing behavior that adjusts flexibly to new situations.

5. Process views of personality

Over the past decade, the application of cognitive and social–cognitive sciences to personality constructs has offered a means to reconcile differences between dispositional and process perspectives by re-conceptualizing the structure of personality as a stable, but dynamic system of interconnected networks of selves. This system bears resemblance to the connectionist networks of leadership perception described previously (e.g., Hannah et al., 2009; Lord et al., 2001); and network models of the self are rel- evant when explaining how thoughts, beliefs, and actions can exhibit both variability and stability in different situations, and at different points in time (Fleeson, 2001; Hannah et al., 2009; Mischel & Shoda, 1998; Read et al., 2010; Shoda et al., 2002; Tett & Burnett, 2003). Here, the importance of intrapersonal processes and a focus on events becomes central to understanding leader- ship outcomes, which we expand upon by first considering newer conceptualizations of personality and the structure of the self.

5.1. Network models of personality

According to a number of models (e.g., Hannah et al., 2009; Read et al., 2010; Shoda et al., 2002), the structure of personality can be envisioned as a network of interconnected mental representations or “person-variables” that consist of our enduring be- liefs, goals, identities, values, knowledge, and experiences. Together, these comprise what is referred to as cognitive–affective

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processing systems (or CAPS) that in aggregate, represent the core structure of the self that manifests as one's personality (Shoda et al., 2002). From a CAPS perspective, the structure of personality is thought of as being stable and enduring, but can exhibit var- iability very similar to the network models of prototype activation that explain how perceptual prototypes can be “tuned” to spe- cific contexts (Hanges et al., 2000; Lord et al., 2001).

The unique element of a CAPS perspective is that it explains how the self-structure is capable of adapting and generating new behavioral responses since not all of the components within CAPS are active at the same time. In fact, as different patterns and configurations of CAPS units are selectively activated in response to different situations and contexts, individuals can express a variable array of behaviors (Fleeson, 2001; Hannah et al., 2009; Tett & Burnett, 2003). In a notable study, Fleeson (2001) found that individuals manifest a wide range of behaviors over the course of a normal work day beyond the mean of their Big Five trait. Importantly, his finding that the degree of within-person variability on each of the Big Five dimensions was greater than between-person variability in behavior implies that individuals are indeed flexible and responsive to their situational environ- ments. Evidence of such behavioral variability has also been demonstrated in other empirical works (e.g., Fleeson, 2007; Read et al., 2010; Reis et al., 2000).

To illustrate this process, research has demonstrated that personal values, which can be represented as components of CAPS, are influential in shaping behavior (Bardi, Calogero, & Mullen, 2008; Bardi & Schwartz, 2003; Verplanken & Holland, 2002) and have been shown to predict the likelihood of behaving morally in tasks that present individuals with the opportunity to cheat for self-gain (Dinh et al., in press). However, when values become important for predicting behavior may depend on whether other critical components of CAPS, such as a particular identity, is also currently active (Verplanken & Holland, 2002). Hence, in- dividuals can express behavioral variability based on the configuration of active identity and values. Because leaders can readily influence the saliency (or activation) of different follower identities (Lord & Brown, 2004; van Knippenberg et al., 2004), these findings imply that leaders also can influence the underlying process that determines whether values become manifested as be- havioral responses to specific events.

Although our emphasis had been on how cognitive constructs (e.g., identity, values, and goal structures) can activate different CAPS components, momentary shifts in one's affective experiences can also contribute to the dynamics of intrapersonal processes. For example, people consciously or non-consciously appraise their social experiences in terms of the degree of self-relevance and underlying causes (Coté, 2005; Elfenbein, 2008; Ellsworth & Scherer, 2003). This appraisal, in turn, elicits various emotions (Matsumoto & Willingham, 2006), which then can influence the direction, magnitude, and persistence of goal-directed behavior. Thus, affect also influences how behavior emerges at an event-level (Kuppens, Oravecz, & Tuerlinckx, 2010), and this occurs as affect influences one's progress judgment of reaching a goal, the attractiveness or perceived value of a goal, and the amount of effort and commitment one puts forth towards attaining a behavioral outcome (Seo et al., 2010).

Abstractly, these processes can be represented in Fig. 3, which show how an individual's self-structure can produce consistent responses to specific situational cues, but also has the potential to flexibly adjust to different events. In many situations for exam- ple, leaders may adopt a more participative or authoritarian form of leadership based upon strong active identities from cultural differences. However, within a particular situation, an authoritarian leader might intervene and delegate orders when team con- flicts emerge (E1), or monitor progress when there is a stable workflow (E2). A participative leader on the other hand, may me- diate open-discussions when team members disagree on an action strategy (E1), or may collaborate with team members when developing change initiatives (E2).

Although the self-structure may seem to be a simple feed-forward network of mental associations, the complexity of the network (or the self) may increase as meditational units (i.e., “hidden layers”) and other individual mental structures become active through “spreading activation.” This adds variability and reduces the predictability of the overall system as different components within CAPS interact and aggregate in non-linear or non-isomorphic ways (Shoda et al., 2002). The result of this dynamic aggregation process is that individuals are able to enact more complex behavioral alternatives in response to different events even though the underlying structure of the self (or connections among units) remains unchanged. For example, as people encounter experiences that vary in the degree of threat, different patterns of neural activity are generated in disparate regions of the brain, which are associated with the ac- tivation of different affective structures, such as the anticipation of reward or fear-related anxiety (Gray, 2001; Harmon-Jones, 2007). Sequentially, these structures can interact, recruiting additional information processing systems and semantic memory networks, which activate different goal-orientations, like a promotion or prevention goal-orientation (DeShon & Gillespie, 2005). Thus, CAPS units and other aspects of personality operate as complex networks that create appropriate, contextually-grounded goal structures, and these processes operate within the overarching constraints created by active self-concepts as shown in Fig. 3 (Lord et al., 2010; McConnell, 2011).

5.2. Leader complexity theories

Behavioral flexibility and the ability to adapt one's behaviors to specific situations and events can be enriched by recent work on complexity. Basing their work on findings from neighboring cognitive and neuropsychological literatures, Lord et al. (2011) provide a framework for understanding how leaders can perceive, interpret, and respond adaptively to the complexities of their social and organizational environments. According to their framework, behavioral adaptability emanates from the dynamic interaction among four static aspects of complexity (general, social, self, and emotional complexity), and more dynamic self- regulatory systems such as active goals, affect, and working self-identities. Additionally, the state of conscious awareness plays a key role in this framework by serving as a mechanism that integrates static and dynamic processes together (Baars, 1983; Dehaene & Naccache, 2001). In this way, as more static mental structures interact under the constraints from active goals, affect,

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identities, and the physical constraints imposed by the human body (Dinh, Lord, & Hoffman, in press), new processes can emerge in dynamic, non-linear ways to create greater complexity.

As a whole, this dynamic, integrative process creates a capacity to generate novel responses to varying contexts. However, because leader complexity is rooted in stable individual characteristics, the network of associations that represent an individual's self-regulatory structure can achieve both stability and behavioral variability as new inputs create new emergent structures in response to diverse sit- uations (Fleeson, 2001; Hannah et al., 2009; Lord et al., 2011; McConnell, 2011; Shoda et al., 2002). It is also worth noting that how well integrated a leader's self-structure is can also influence their ability to generate more flexible behavioral responses. That is, leaders with highly integrated self-structures may express more variability than those with poorly-integrated self-structures because these leaders will have greater access to different kinds of knowledge structures, memories, scripts, and ways of perceiving information. For example, Grant and Berry (2011) demonstrate that creative thinking and the ability to generate innovative ideas depends not only on how closely one identifies with their work, but also on one's tendency to consider another's perspective. This suggests that when social and work identities are both central to the self, leaders may be better able to create solutions that are considered novel by being able to simulta- neously consider the needs of their organization and their followers.

We suggest that although this perspective parallels in many ways with process views of personality or CAPS, it is important to note that individual or leader complexity theories emphasize the ability of complexity to draw forth and adapt appropriate lead- ership skills to present environments (Hannah et al., 2009; Lord et al., 2011; Uhl-Bien, Marion, & McKelvey, 2007). Thus, a leader may be seen as being “task-oriented” and “organized” in one context, such as in a managerial role, and be “supportive” and “lov- ing” under an entirely different circumstance (e.g., a role as a parent). Complexity theory also views skills, role-based behavioral repertoires, and complexity itself, as being developed over time, a perspective that underlies leadership development (Day, Harrison, & Haplin, 2009). Specifically, in order for a leader to respond successfully to a given situation, he or she must have ac- quired or developed the appropriate self-attributes, skills, and experiences needed (Hannah et al., 2009). This suggests that the more complex a leader becomes, the greater the potential for appropriately responding to varying situational demands and chal- lenges (Boal & Hooijberg, 2001; Carmeli & Halevi, 2009; Hannah et al., 2009; Lord et al., 2011).

In summary, we conceptualize the self-structure and personality as flexible, dynamic systems that emerge as diverse mental structures interact in response to leadership contexts or experienced events, which we have represented in Fig. 3. This perspec- tive highlights the importance of understanding individual-level phenomena from a person-parts perspective (i.e., individuals are the aggregate of heterogeneous elements like mental structures that produce within person variability as each part is activated; Hall & Lord, 1995; Klein, Dansereau, & Hall, 1994) especially when one considers that leaders encounter a variety of situations that can provide unique input patterns into stable self-structures. This perspective presents significant implications on understanding how and when leaders emerge, as well as how these intrapersonal dynamic processes can affect individual-, group-, and organizational-level outcomes, which are addressed in the following two sections.

6. Process approaches, leadership emergence, and effectiveness

6.1. Leadership emergence

Leaders are embedded in complex, changing organizational systems that require them to perceive, understand, and convey to others a direction to best achieve their organization's objectives. As leader complexity theories suggest (Lord et al., 2011), this ability is directly related to the diversity of an individual's intrapersonal resources that include their areas of expertise, skills, and knowledge, which varies from person to person. Therefore, depending on the requirements of a particular situation, different individuals may be best suited to lead (Day et al., 2009; DeRue & Ashford, 2010), and for groups or organizations to effectively use varied resources, the leadership potential in others needs to be appropriately recognized. This requirement creates a conundrum for perceivers who may rely on overly general leadership prototypes to guide leadership perceptions when processing resources that are taxed by novel events. Here, both complexity in dynamic individual perceptual structures (Lord et al., 2001) and in the social dynamics involved in claiming and granting leadership status (DeRue & Ashford, 2010) are needed to accord leadership status to the most capable individual. This issue has important implications for contemporary views of shared or distributive leadership (Carson, Tesluk, & Marrone, 2007; Pearce & Conger, 2003; Pearce, Conger, & Locke, 2008; Wassenaar & Pearce, 2012) so both of these dynamic perceptual processes are explained in the following paragraphs.

With regards to the complexity in dynamic individual perceptual structures, we have mentioned previously that multiple leadership prototypes and identities may become active under different contexts as sensory and perceptual cues selectively acti- vate different components of a leader prototype (Lord & Hall, 2005; Lord et al., 2001). When applied to shared or distributed forms of leadership, dynamic prototype generating processes afford diversity in the kinds of leaders an individual can recognize. Ideally, this perceptual flexibility allows perceivers to fine tune leadership to unique events and situations by granting leadership to appropriate others. Hence, this source of variability provides flexibility in shared forms of leadership by allowing different mem- bers of a team to be viewed as a leader based on the dynamic relation of intrapersonal perceptual structures to various events. Impor- tantly, this view also suggests that such idiosyncrasies may be best understood at an event-level. In fact, team members may differ in the complexity of their perceptual structures as a result of prior leadership experiences, but this complexity, and its relation to dynamic social perception processes, would be obscured by dispositional approaches that aggregate across events.

The decision to grant leadership may also become influenced by collective group processes. As DeRue and Ashford (2010) sug- gest, leadership is a dynamic, socially constructed process that involves reciprocal reinforcing patterns of granting and claiming behaviors that support a leadership identity. According to this perspective, leadership is a negotiated process that occurs as

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individuals claim (or grant) a leadership identity to themselves (or others). On one hand, individuals may claim a leadership iden- tity based on conscious assessments of their own image of a leader, their prior experiences as a leader, or from the perceived risks and benefits that may accrue from being a leader. On the other hand, perceivers may grant leadership status to others based on the fit of the potential leader's behaviors to the perceivers' implicit theories of leadership, or based on their recollection of the leader's past performances. Although the final outcome of being perceived as a leader occurs at a group-level as group members negotiate and converge on a potential leader (DeRue & Ashford, 2010), our focus on a parts perspective suggests that the decision to claim or grant a leadership identity to oneself (or others) in group contexts may arise from more dynamic intrapersonal pro- cesses that are better explained by complexity or process approaches to leadership. People may be more likely to see themselves as a leader for instance, if their self-attributions fit their image of a leader within a particular context; if they possess the appro- priate skills, abilities, and could recall being a successful leader within a given moment; or if they are experiencing positive emo- tions that can help broaden their creativity and worldview (Fredrickson, 2001; Isen, Daubman, & Nowicki, 1987); however, individual differences in orientations toward leadership are also important (Chan & Drasgow, 2001).

This process can be illustrated in the following example. For instance, laboratory and field studies consistently show that men are more likely than women to emerge as leaders (Dobbins, Long, Dedrick, & Clemons, 1990; Hall et al., 1998) due to social ex- pectations and gender stereotypes that view men as being the more dominant and agentic figure (Eagly & Karau, 2002; Ritter & Yoder, 2004). Under certain conditions, however, research suggests that women are more likely to be perceived as leaders. In fact, a meta-analysis conducted by Eagly and Karau (1991) found that while men are more likely to emerge as leaders in small groups engaged in task-related issues, women are more likely to be perceived as leaders when complex social interactions are involved. Consequently, because groups and work teams periodically alternate between task and socially focused issues in a work shift (Harrison, Mohammed, McGrath, Florey, & Vanderstoep, 2003; McGrath, 1991; Morgeson, 2005), there may be a ten- dency for leadership to alternate between men and women. Recent studies (e.g., Brown, Diekman, & Schneider, 2011; Ryan, Haslam, Hersby, & Bongiorno, 2011) also demonstrate this shift in leadership emergence, where women rather than men, were more likely to emerge as leaders when events are perceived to be uncertain and unstable (e.g., organizational crisis, change). Men, however, were more likely to emerge as leaders when events are routine.

Although our discussion has focused on leadership emergence within group contexts that involve shared or distributive lead- ership, we note that it is not always necessary that individuals shift in and out of leadership roles. It is also important to note that leadership perceptions tend to have cognitive inertia that resists change in social perceptions (Foti et al., 2008; Hanges, Lord, Godfrey, & Raver, 2002). For instance, leaders within traditional, hierarchically structured forms of leadership are granted a lead- ership title or position, and generally, there is stability in leadership perceptions (Foti et al., 2008). However, cognitive inertia in leadership perceptions may impede the fluid reallocation of leadership required when events or situations change, limiting the potential of many groups to flexibly adjust leadership perception processes. In fact, the same leader may exhibit different types of leadership behavior depending on the events that he or she encounters (Kozlowski et al., 2009; Morgeson et al., 2010). For ex- ample, a leader may alternate from passively monitoring to actively directing team responses at different points in a performance cycle based on the needs and unfolding of events (Klein, Ziegert, Knight, & Xiao, 2006; Morgeson, 2005). Consequently, individ- uals may retain his or her leadership status across scenarios, but the perception of the individual as an effective or ineffective leader may vary across events. This point is discussed further in the following section.

However, it should be noted that under certain circumstances, the perception of a target as a leader can dynamically shift based on responses to a specific event, especially when the target behaves in ways that violate followers' expectations or leadership prototype (Foti et al., 2008). History is replete with such examples. For example, although Tony Hayward and Joe Paterno were arguably good leaders who led their team and organization to success for many years, a single tumultuous event led Hayward to step down as the CEO of BP and Paterno to be dismissed as head coach from Penn State University. Hence, it is possible under severe events for leaders to be removed from their leadership position, and this type of occurrence emphasizes the importance of an event-level focus in un- derstanding how leadership perception and effectiveness may shift over time.

In summary, the flexibility of leadership perception and emergence requires an explicit focus at the level of events to under- stand how micro-level processes, such as perceptual prototype generation, affective structures, and leadership identities dynam- ically shift with new events to facilitate or discourage leadership emergence.

6.2. Leadership effectiveness

We argue that the same approach of using an event-level focus can be applied to understanding leadership effectiveness both from leadership theory and leadership development perspectives. In terms of understanding leadership effectiveness, we maintain that the- ory should be developed at the level of events (Lord & Dinh, 2012). This is because leadership behaviors that may be crucial to success for one type of event may be unrelated or even negatively related to success on other events. For example, Morgeson (2005) found that for self-managing teams, the usefulness of external leadership (sensemaking and coaching) was moderated by the disruptiveness of specific events. However, if Morgeson had looked merely at the overall relation of sensemaking and coaching without considering the nature of events, important variance in the relation of functional leadership processes to outcomes would have been missed.

Similar arguments apply to understanding leadership development. In the preceding paragraphs, we have described how a leader's ability to adjust to complex situations depends on their ability to integrate diverse intrapersonal resources to create adap- tive behavioral responses. This implies that the measure of a leader's success may vary from situation to situation depending on the correspondence between one's level of self-complexity and the complexity of the environment. However, individuals may adapt to their environment over time as the underlying dynamics of self-complexity change to accommodate new skills,

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perspectives, and behavioral alternatives that a leader may acquire. As neuropsychological research shows, this is possible because the human brain is capable of demonstrating significant cortical reorganization as it can modify existing neuronic connections to in- tegrate new information with existing knowledge stores (Chklovskii, Mel, & Svoboda, 2004; Johansen-Berg, 2007; Lee et al., 2001). Therefore, as information is practiced or is experienced repeatedly, self-complexity increases as new brain synapses and information pathways are created and strengthened, while weaker connections are winnowed (Chechik, Meilijson, & Ruppin, 1999).

From a leadership standpoint, these mechanisms enable one to develop, learn, and increase self-complexity as existing cognitive and affective structures are created and modified when leaders experience different kinds of events and social reactions from others. Importantly, because modifications to the self-structure can alter how memories and cognitive structures are integrated, individuals may learn to improve their performance as they reflect upon their past experiences, or as they receive social feedback from their lead- ership attempts (Day et al., 2009; Hogue & Lord, 2007). For example, studies demonstrate that practicing self-reflection following the receipt of performance feedback is positively related to task-performance (Anseel, Lievens, & Schollaert, 2009). Other research shows that experiencing early life challenges (e.g., youth deviancy), helped certain individuals become more effective leaders later on in their careers (Avolio, Rotundo, & Walumbwa, 2009; Bray, Campbell, & Grant, 1974) presumably because these events were quite memorable and were used to inform future behavior. In addition, encountering challenging work experiences can promote the development of leadership skills by motivating leaders to think critically about the antecedents and consequences of a problem, which facilitates the development of new cognitive structures and strategic skills (DeRue & Wellman, 2009). It is also important to note that the outcome of leadership efforts are also influenced by larger group processes where positive or negative group reactions to a leader (e.g., the acceptance of, or rejection of a leader's action) can encourage or deter future leadership attempts and learning (DeRue & Ashford, 2010; Hogue & Lord, 2007). As these examples show, memorable events, especially those that encourage self- reflection, can foster the development of important leadership skills and cognitive structures (e.g., behavioral scripts) as individuals re- flect on their actions and behaviors. Thus, the development of leadership skills may occur over long periods of time, in response to many types of events, and sources of feedback (Day, 2012; Day et al., 2009; Lord & Hall, 2005).

Given that leaders come with different backgrounds, skills, and experiences, which are then expressed in the complexity of modern- day organizational environments (Marion & Uhl-Bien, 2001), it may be difficult to fully understand leadership perceptions, leader effec- tiveness, or leader development at a person-level. Such person-level assessments require that perceivers aggregate their perceptions over multiple, and perhaps divergent events, or alternatively, base their perceptions only on recent events. Additionally, measures of leadership performance may require an aggregation of varied leadership outcomes as leaders respond to different organizational events. Hence, while a dispositional approach may offer insight into how one typically behaves or performs, it does not explicate the dynamic processes that underlie a leader's ability to learn or flexibly adapt their behavioral responses from one moment to the next. Disposition- al approaches are also limited in regards to illuminating how acquired skills, interests, and task characteristics contribute to a leader's varied impact on performance across different work tasks and disparate events as shown by research using event-sampling method- ologies (see Fisher, 2008; Fisher & Noble, 2004). Last, the practical thrust of trait theories of leadership is oriented more towards selec- tion processes (e.g., find an exceptional leader; Thompson et al., 2008; Wood & Vilkinas, 2007), whereas the process perspective we have developed is focused more on leader training and development that occurs over time (e.g., Day, 2012; Day et al., 2009).

To complete our comparison between dispositional and process perspectives, we note that multistage models of leadership performance (e.g., DeRue et al., 2011; Van Iddekinge, Ferris, & Heffner, 2009; Zaccaro et al., 2004), share some overlap with our approach. Similar to process approaches to leadership, these models suggest that traits do not have a straightforward effect on leadership perception or effec- tiveness (DeRue et al., 2011; Van Iddekinge et al., 2009; Zaccaro et al., 2004). Instead, they differentiate between two aspects of trait in- fluences — such that traits have both a distal and proximal component. By distal attributes, we mean the traits, abilities, and qualities that are endemic within an individual, remain stable over time, and are not contextually specific. In contrast, proximal attributes, such as problem-solving skills, social appraisal processes, and knowledge, are extensions of distal attributes, but are contextually specific, and may or may not be appropriate to a particular situation (Mumford et al., 2000). Hence, distal components can be conceptualized to exude stable energies that are channeled through more proximal components to influence behavior (Elliot & Thrash, 2002; Lee, Sheldon, & Turban, 2003).

However, multistage models of personality differ from process-oriented approaches in two notable respects. First, process-oriented approaches conceptualize personality and the structure of the self in terms of a connectionist network structure where different patterns among distal and proximal components (or nodes) may independently or dynamically interact to influence leadership outcomes. Thus, it does not necessarily follow a meditational framework, although this type of framework can be represented in process models as net- works in which hidden layers mediate between sets of distal and proximal components. Second, multistage models posit that the joint influence of distal and proximal components is required to predict the next variable on the meditational chain. That is, it requires that distal components (e.g., traits, abilities) predict proximal components (e.g., problem solving skills, goals), which together, predict leadership outcomes like performance. As such, the model implies that the effects of distal and proximal components are stable and re- main active over time. In contrast, process-oriented approaches suggest that different aspects of the self may become active when one experiences different events and situational cues (Kuhnen et al., 2001; LaBoeuf, Shafir, & Bayuk, 2010; McConnell, 2011). These may in- clude for instance, sensory or embodied processes like touch, smell, or movement as one interacts with different individuals (Andersen & Chen, 2002; Ashton-James, van Baaren, Chartrand, Decety, & Karremans, 2007). Consequently, each self-aspect is not required to remain active from a process perspective and such dynamic processes are not easily addressed by multistage models.

In summary, we maintain that there are several limitations with dispositional approaches when applied to understanding leadership processes. As we have discussed, the relation of individual differences to leadership perception and performance are not as easily predicted as dispositional views would imply. These factors present important implications for current methodolo- gies in leadership research, which we address in the following section.

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7. Events level methodologies and accuracy in measures of leadership

7.1. Problems with aggregated cross-situational leadership measures

Heretofore, we have argued that the relationship between traits and perception, and traits and performance, cannot be fully under- stood as an aggregation of events experienced across time. Instead, a more appropriate model is to view leadership perception and per- formance within a restricted range in time. However, this concept is not widely practiced in leadership research (Naidoo, Kohari, Lord, & Dubois, 2010; Shondrick et al., 2010), perhaps because personality is most typically understood as being stable and invariant across different contexts and time (Barrick & Mount, 2005). For example, written leadership assessment questionnaires typically ask that raters evaluate their leader's performance over a period of weeks, months, or years (Naidoo et al., 2010; Shondrick et al., 2010). Con- sequently, although behavioral aggregation techniques offer insight into how individuals would normally behave (Barrick & Mount, 2005), the same methods can obscure, or entirely miss the dynamic micro-level processes that contribute to perceptual and behavioral variability (Dalal & Hulin, 2008; Lord & Brown, 2004). Inattention to such detail can also reduce the accuracy of relating behavior ratings to the construct of interest (e.g., trait and leadership performance).

Another concern with aggregate behavioral questionnaires is that they can activate cognitive schemas or heuristics (e.g., leadership prototypes) that contain knowledge of how leaders typically behave. As such, the accuracy of leadership assessments may decline as in- dividuals rely on these implicit assumptions or generalizations of their leader to inform their evaluations even though they may not be true or are particularly relevant (Foti & Lord, 1987; Phillips, 1984). This effect is widely demonstrated in the performance appraisal lit- erature. For instance, research shows that raters can unintentionally distort their performance appraisal ratings based on the stereotypes that are related to one's race (Baltes, Bauer, & Frensch, 2007; Stauffer & Buckley, 2005) or gender (Heilman & Chen, 2005). In fact, Heilman and Chen (2005) show that due to social norms, females are often expected to behave prosocially towards others, and this as- sociation is common to many supervisors' prototype of an effective female employee. Consequently, engaging in prosocial behavior may be a requirement to receive positive performance evaluations for female employees, but not male employees, as this prototype creates an implicit standard that supervisors use to evaluate female employees.

7.2. Advantages of event-level leadership measures

To address these issues, a growing body of research has emphasized the use event-level methodologies and episodic memory to circumvent the problems associated with aggregating behavioral measures across situations and contexts (Morgeson, 2005; Morgeson & DeRue, 2006; Naidoo et al., 2010). In general, events refer to a time-bounded episode that happens in a certain place and time, where different events can vary in the level of severity and frequency of occurrence. Events can range for example, from large-scale industrial accidents that disrupt entire organizations, to an employee receiving positive (or negative) feedback from his or her immediate supervisor. An important characteristic of events is that an event be jarring or disruptive enough so that the leader (or follower) engages in controlled, conscious processing to make sense of the situation. In this process, informa- tion is likely encoded within event-specific knowledge structures, which offer the potential for greater accuracy when retrieval of these memories also occurs at the level of events, rather than at a person-level (Shondrick et al., 2010).

The use of event-level methodologies has a number of advantages. For one, recalling events involves the recruitment of epi- sodic memory stores. Generally, memory researchers have distinguished between two types of memory: semantic memory and episodic memory. Whereas semantic memory includes facts and pieces of knowledge that are generally true (e.g., the sky is blue), episodic memory includes memories of vivid experiences that are emotionally tinged and are recalled within specific con- texts (Tulving, 1972, 2002). For example, the process of visualizing a fiery orange sunset may facilitate access to a memory of walking down a sandy coastline while hearing the deafening sound of breaking waves. Therefore, episodic memories are highly contextualized and measures that can access episodic memory stores may avoid contamination by cognitive biases by facilitating one's ability to re-experience the sensory, affective, and visual details that had occurred during an event (Martell & Evans, 2005).

The advantages of using event-level methodologies have been demonstrated in a number of empirical studies. Morgeson (2005) for example, examined the impact leaders had on the efficiency of semi-autonomous work teams during disruptive events by asking followers specific event-related questions about their leader (e.g., “tell me about a time when a problem or incident occurred that af- fected the team's ability to get its work done in which you somehow intervened to get them back on track”). Importantly, his work showed that the novelty and disruptiveness of specific events moderated the relation of various functional leadership behaviors to perceived leader effectiveness. Therefore, event-level methodologies can provide researchers with the ability to analyze how specific leadership behaviors and ways of responding to particular situations relate to effective team performance. Such micro-level moder- ation of the behavior-to-outcome relation would be missed if measurement techniques had focused exclusively on person, rather than event-level leadership ratings. Other approaches for engaging rater's episodic memory stores have also been implemented with positive results. For example, Naidoo et al. (2010) found that when participants were instructed to visualize their leader just prior to responding to a leadership assessment survey, the results of the assessment were more accurate than when visualization did not occur. These authors suggest that visualization techniques helped engage episodic memory and heighten the role of affect, which facilitated the ability to recall specific details that had occurred during an event.

Event-level methodologies, which provide researchers with the ability to capture situational details, also create new possibil- ities for understanding the dynamics of leadership perception and effectiveness. This is because leaders experience different types of events that when viewed from a person-parts perspective, create unique informational inputs that are processed differentially within persons over time. For example, although a particular individual typically prefers to be led by others, he or she may emerge

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as a leader when a situation draws on their unique skills. Concretely, a paramedic may lead in a medical emergency because they can quickly access needed knowledge and can remain calm during chaotic situations, but may not emerge as leaders in other cir- cumstances. Thus, event-level methodologies may be particularly useful in understanding the kinds of events that cause team members to switch between being a leader (or follower) within shared or distributive forms of leadership (Carson et al., 2007; Wassenaar & Pearce, 2012) or self-managing teams (Klein et al., 2006; Morgeson, 2005). These examples also show that greater attention to events may clarify the conditions where one is more likely to emerge and be perceived as an effective leader.

In more hierarchical forms of leadership, event-level methodologies can advance research that identifies the situational characteristics which introduce variability in how leaders react and perform in different organizational episodes (Kozlowski et al., 2009; Morgeson et al., 2010). In this way, leader (or follower) performance assessments that rely on specific events are more accurate as individuals do not per- form consistently over time and situations (Fisher, 2008; Fisher & Noble, 2004). Indeed, this growing awareness has encouraged organi- zational practices of keeping event-diaries for making performance evaluations among managers and supervisors (Ilgen, Barnes-Farrell, & McKellin, 1993; Levy & Williams, 2004). Encouraging conscious recollection of events or using event-experience sampling methodologies in research may also reduce the use of cognitive heuristics and biases that distort the accuracy of performance assessments (Baltes et al., 2007; Heilman & Chen, 2005; Landy & Farr, 1980; Stauffer & Buckley, 2005).

7.3. Measurement accuracy and test of meditational theories

Using the framework shown in Fig. 1, we previously noted that it is essential to have highly accurate measures of meditational processes. This is because mediators are involved in calculating both paths a and b, so that the mediated effects, ab, are doubly attenuated by unreliability of mediators. This problem makes it very difficult to accurately partition the effects of individual dif- ferences into direct and mediated leadership effects unless errors are also effectively modeled as they are in random coefficients modeling approaches (Hall & Usher-Perez, 2011). Assessing accuracy in measurement is also compounded by an overreliance on internal consistency estimates of reliability, which may have no relation to actual validity (McCrae, Kurtz, Yamagata, & Terracciano, 2011). It may be more accurate to rely on test–retest measures of accuracy (McCrae et al., 2011), but given the sen- sitivity of leadership behavior to contexts and events, test–retest measures of accuracy would only be appropriate when used within a particular kind of context or event. Thus, as we attempt to model more comprehensive theories of leadership that take account of mediation, we may need to move down to an event-level to assess leader behavior. Morgeson (2005) used such an approach and had different individuals describe leadership behaviors for the same event. By using this methodology, interrater agreement could be used to estimate reliability as a preferred means rather than relying on coefficient alpha or other internal consistency estimates.

8. Implications and agenda for future research

To date, there is strong evidence to suggest that the difficulties with typical retrospective measures of leadership may be reduced by using event-level methodologies, and a focus at this level is needed especially as we seek to advance theory in understanding leadership outcomes. Although focusing on events may come at a cost to parsimony as one reviewer noted, the level of detail offered by process approaches may justify its costs by providing valuable insight into the processes involved in translating stable dispositions to leadership emergence and effectiveness. Clearer insight in this area allows practitioners and scholars to better understand how leaders can shape dynamic intrapersonal processes by using conscious and non-conscious forms of communication to achieve organizational goals. As we have noted above, these may include, but are not limited to priming specific follower self-identities, affect, and goal orientations through process that range from explicit persuasion to the automatic effects of embodied processes. Insight into the dynamics of intra- personal processes as they relate to changing external and internal events can also illuminate how affective events and changes to a leader's WSC may influence how information is processed (Kuhnen et al., 2001). It is only with such knowledge that leadership inter- ventions can be developed to emphasize the critical role dynamic intrapersonal structures have in shaping informational processing and social influence processes. In this section, we identify several areas for new research and practice.

8.1. Leadership and characteristics of events

As leaders navigate through their social environments, they encounter a diverse range of events that vary in terms of impor- tance and influence. However, what is missing from the literature is a general taxonomy that would allow scholars to identify and classify the kinds of events that are experienced by leaders. In this regard, Hoffman and Lord (in press) provide a preliminary framework that identifies six dimensions that can be used to classify events. For instance, they argue that events can be catego- rized as being: static or dynamic, personally relevant or irrelevant, novel or familiar, extraordinary or ordinary, interpreted with positive or negative emotion, and the event's temporal range (e.g., a span of minutes vs. years). In combination, these dimensions are proposed to affect how leaders (and followers) construe events, which in turn, influence how leaders make decisions and con- vey meaning to followers. Their work also emphasizes that events are a continual source of entropy, which disorganizes social systems. However, leaders function to counteract such effects through sensegiving processes, and work that makes clear distinc- tions among events is important as it helps identify the qualitative differences that may affect leadership outcomes. Novel events, for example, may create greater entropy and therefore, require greater analytical depth and attention to detail than familiar events that use well known scripts as a basis for sensemaking. In this vein, it may also be helpful to consider synthesizing taxonomic information re- garding events with detailed information regarding context (Porter & McLaughlin, 2006). Context can be viewed as a set of constraints

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that stem from constructs like climate, structures, goals, and processes that affect how events unfold. When assessing the effects of event novelty or familiarity for instance, it is helpful to know the social and organizational resources that are needed to cope with novelty, or the standard procedures that apply when experiencing familiar events. Together with network models of personality, such contextual constraints could help scholars understand the dynamics of specific leadership events especially since causal dynamics are likely to re- flect the joint effects of event characteristics, contextual features, and individual differences in personality and leadership ability.

8.2. Leadership, embodiment, and event-level methodology

Event taxonomies should also consider that events differ in terms of the emotions and physical embodiment (e.g., gestures, body mo- tions) that are expressed and experienced by leaders and followers. A growing body of research suggests that these subtle transient cues may have important consequences on leadership perceptions and information processing (Dinh et al., in press; Lord & Shondrick, 2011). In fact, research on embodiment and embodied cognitions (Niedenthal, Barsalou, Winkielman, Krauth-Gruber, & Rie, 2005; Pfeifer & Bongard, 2006) indicate that the physical morphology and materials that compose the human body (e.g., shape of the body and limbs, muscle elasticity, and plasticity of the skin) have an indelible effect on higher cognitive thinking. This perspective maintains there is continuity between the mind and body (Johnson & Rohrer, 2007), such that the morphology and physical dynamics of the body not only inform, but can substitute for cognitive processing (Pfeifer & Bongard, 2006). For example, the elasticity and spring in the leg muscles of a human being allows the body to make local adjustments to adapt to uneven shifts in the terrain, which frees higher order cognitive resources to process more central tasks. Dinh et al. (in press) argue that such embodied systems have a fundamental role in shaping leadership perceptions and higher level thinking, but that additional research is needed to understand how these processes can be captured and measured at an event-level.

Although research in this domain is still in its infancy, notable work that uses camcorders and body sensors to capture subtle body movements, with algorithms that transform this information into fractual scaling (i.e., 1/f signals; D'Mello, Dale, & Graesser, 2011; Kello, Beltz, Holden, & Van Orden, 2007) provides one avenue researchers can use to investigate how embodied processes influence cognition. Fractual scaling, or “pink noise,” refers to a specific brain frequency pattern that is generated by cognitive processes, but these patterns are also manifested in the body's movements. As D'Mello et al. (2011) demonstrate, breaks in the fractual scaling signal with a concurrent physical movement may indicate which specific embodied process is responsible for disrupting higher-order cog- nitive processing.

Understanding the relation of embodied processes (reflexes, grasps, gestures, and postures) to cognition may also increase our un- derstanding of how this system contributes to (or constrains) leadership perceptions as well as a leader's performance. Research could explore for instance, how subtle changes in postures (e.g., an expansive or diminished posture) may affect one's perception of power (Huang et al., 2011), and consequently, leadership emergence in dynamic group settings. Additionally, research shows that warmer temperatures can increase trust and cooperation as the brain (e.g., the insula) transforms physical sensations into social assessments (Kang, Williams, Clark, Gray, & Bargh, 2011). Therefore, expressions that covey warmth (e.g., a pat on the back) may create a basis for trust in leaders and leader–follower relations (Levav & Argo, 2010; McAllister, 1995).

Empirical work on embodied cognitions also shows that there is a tendency for human beings to mimic one another's body actions and facial expressions (Niedenthal et al., 2005), which can affect leader and follower cognitions. In fact, the mere act of copying a leader's facial expressions (e.g., a smile) may lead to emotional contagion and the transmission of positive affect. Emo- tional contagion can in turn, influence followers' perception of charismatic leadership (Erez, Misangyi, Johnson, LePine, & Halverson, 2008; Johnson, 2008), but it might also influence follower trust and creative capacities through the experience of pos- itive emotions (Fredrickson, 2001). Additionally, it is likely that other bodily cues and sensory-rich metaphors (e.g., words that convey embodiment such as ‘heavy’) may disproportionally influence follower cognitions. However, these processes are likely to occur on a moment-to-moment basis, rather than a person-level basis, and research that closely explores how non-verbal forms of communication can influence outcomes like performance and emergence may be beneficial.

8.3. Leadership development, paradoxical traits, and event-level methodology

Years ago, Epstein (1979) argued that the apparent lack of evidence that personality was stable was due to the use of single item measures of behavior, which typically had high errors of measurement. As a methodological improvement, he demonstrated that stability in personality could be achieved by aggregating behavioral observations over multiple events. Although the stability between personality and behavior is important from a dispositional perspective, and is useful in understanding how leaders gen- erally respond, such practices also eliminate the utility of event-level data in understanding the source of intrapersonal variability, and how unique events contribute to leader developmental processes. Consistent with this perspective, Day et al. (2009) argued that leader development is an idiosyncratic, lifelong process. That is, leaders do not develop in the same way in that experiencing significant events can fundamentally change a leader's developmental growth pattern (e.g., Day & Sin, 2011). Thus, focusing on events may be a valuable endeavor that also corresponds to calls for conducting more longitudinal leadership research (e.g., Ayman & Adams, 2012; Day, 2012; Shamir, 2011), which provide greater detail on micro processes than analytical methods that aggregate over time. Indeed, the failure to account time-based processes through longitudinal research may increase the pos- sibility of Type I (i.e., identifying effects that are robust in cross-sectional studies but are not over time) and Type II temporal er- rors (i.e., missing effects that may not be observable unless observed over time) (McGrath, Arrow, Gruenfeld, Hollingshead, & O'Connor, 1993).

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The effects on development also occur at higher levels of aggregation. For example, Day et al. (2009) argued that leadership development (as opposed to leader development) refers to the development of leadership skills in an entire group. As such, thinking in terms of events can also help us understand the longitudinal development of leadership skills at this or higher levels of analysis. For example, several researchers have noted that experiencing similar events over time allows teams to form mental models and knowledge structures that increase routinization and work performance (e.g., Harrison et al., 2003; Kozlowski et al., 2009; McGrath et al., 1993). Occasionally however, group systems can shift as a result of disruptive events (Harrison et al., 2003; McGrath et al., 1993), which forces leaders and teams to adapt to these unique experiences (Kozlowski et al., 2009).

Last, longitudinal research using event-level methodologies can help clarify the nature of paradoxical traits, which can have both positive and negative effects on outcomes (Judge & Long, 2012). As a number of authors show (e.g., Harms, Spain, & Hannah, 2011; Judge & Long, 2012), even ‘bright’ leadership traits that have typically been associated with positive outcomes, such as extraversion and conscientiousness, may become detrimental for leader and organizational performance under certain situations. For example, although the enthusiasm and assertiveness of extraverted leaders may help them appear charismatic, their excitability and desire for novelty may make them appear shallow or inconsistent when making decisions (Judge & Long, 2012). In contrast, ‘dark side’ traits (e.g., Machiavellianism) can sometimes enhance leader development (Harms et al., 2011). As Judge and Long (2012) note, these findings indicate that traits do not always have a predictable linear effect on leadership out- comes and that there is added value in exploring how trait–outcome relationships may change with different events.

8.4. Methodologies for longitudinal event-level data

An important limitation with longitudinal event-level research is the difficulty of collecting data points over extended periods of time. In fact, the success of longitudinal designs is contingent on continual subject participation. Often, there are high rates of attrition, which is associated with a reduction in within-person variance in the dependent variable of interest. Over the past few years however, technological advances have expanded many of the methodologies that can be used to sample events, which in- creases the ease of conducting longitudinal research. At the same time, technological advances have also outdated many of the methods commonly used to collect event-level data (e.g., PDAs, electronic diaries). Hence, an important issue for future research is to develop new techniques and methods that are both convenient and are cost effective for conducting longitudinal event-level research. One suggestion, given the increasing popularity of Smartphones, is to utilize email or develop a downloadable applica- tion (i.e., program) that enables users to instantaneously access and complete surveys during specific events or at different points during the day. To the best of our knowledge, these applications have yet to be developed, and the development of software for other internet-accessible hand-held devices (e.g., I-pad, tablet PCs) may also be useful.

8.5. Leadership selection and training

As a reviewer noted, dispositional approaches offer parsimony in selection and training contexts where leaders would be selected based on their level on desirable traits. Although such practices can simplify how organizations might select leaders (for hiring or training purposes), the benefit of dispositional approaches to selection may apply more for organizations with hierarchical structures where leaders do not typically shift in and out of their leadership roles as they do in team-based forms of leadership (e.g., Cannella, Park, & Lee, 2008; Klein et al., 2006; Kozlowski et al., 2009). For these latter types of organizations, selection based on other variables (e.g., intrapersonal complexity in values, identity) that are explicitly considered by process approaches may be more useful. For ex- ample, more complex leaders may more easily adjust to being a leader at one point and a collaborator at another as team-based lead- ership requires (Hannah et al., 2011). Complex leaders may also be more adept at sensemaking, shaping group identities, and managing other's emotional responses to different events to facilitate team collaborative efforts.

Process approaches also offer greater potential for leadership training and development because they better articulate the pro- cesses that actually generate behavior. For example, personal values are often thought of as being stable factors that directly affect behavior, but research shows that it is often more accurate to explain behavior in terms of the interaction of values and salient identities. For example, the relation of explicit and implicit values to dependent variables such as ethical choice or consumer decisions depends on the centrality of a value to one's identity (Dinh et al., in press; Verplanken & Holland, 2002). Conse- quently, training that emphasizes the endorsement of specific values would not be effective unless coupled with processes that activate related self-identities. However, this complexity is missed by less dynamic approaches to understanding individ- ual differences.

This discussion demonstrates the added value of considering process approaches within selection and training contexts as it explicitly recognizes the importance dynamic intrapersonal structures have on learning and performance. A future challenge for researchers and practitioners however, is developing the tools needed to assess dynamic intrapersonal processes. To date, a number of recent empirical works have been successful in developing implicit and explicit measures to assess different self-identities and values to predict behavioral outcomes (see Dinh et al., in press; Johnson & Saboe, 2011; Reynolds, Leavitt, & DeCelles, 2010). However, additional work is needed to develop such measures further. Thus, process approaches can provide valuable insight on how micro processes may interact to influence perception and behavior, and this perspective also provides a theoretical foundation for the development of techniques to select or de- velop leaders who can operate effectively within dynamic work settings.

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9. Conclusions

In sum, there are advantages to conceptualizing leadership from both dispositional and process perspectives. We began by emphasizing process views of personality which provide a needed complement to models assuming that leadership traits are stable across time and situations. This perspective enables researchers to gain a better understanding of leadership outcomes such as perception, effectiveness, and the dynamic social processes associated with shared or distributive leadership. We also emphasized that examining leadership at an event-level could enhance our understanding of various contingency effects, as well as how leaders ac- quire specific skills or develop their identity as a leader. Finally, we emphasized the need to accurately measure meditational leadership processes and described several advantages of measurement that focused on events. We believe this view offers new ways to think about leadership, and it has potential for both advancing theory and developing practical leadership interventions.

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