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The effect of implicit leadership theories on consideration and initiating structure ratings from the Leader Behavior Description Questionnaire (XII) was investigated. Factor loadings obtained from students under a limited information condition were compared with those from reported field data. The consideration factors were found to be highly congruent, while initiating structure factors were moderately congruent. These results were consistent with comparisons from three additional samples varying in respondent's familiarity with the leader. Cues regarding performance, sex, and level of accomplishment of the supervisor were also examined in the context of implicit theories. Performance cues were found to have a highly significant effect on subscale ratings. The effect for supervisor's sex was marginally significant. Emphasizing behavior—attention—encoding—memory units inherent in such ratings, rater's limited information processing capacity was suggested as a possible explanation of results. It was concluded, after considering the generalizability of results, that the findings posed a threat to the internal validity of behavioral questionnaires.

The need to incorporate task effects in leadership theories has long been recognized, yet few studies are directed toward this endeavor. The present study addresses this need by developing a cognitively based theory specifying the relations among task structure, leadership behavior, and group performance. The theory assumes that a common problem space facilitates group problem solving. Two testable hypotheses are suggested: (1) task structure and the leadership behavior of developing orientation have similar effects on problem space communality and, thus, are inversely related, and (2) the instrumentally of developing orientation is an inverse function of task structure. These hypotheses were examined in a laboratory experiment investigating problem solving behavior on six tasks varying in structure. Findings support the first, but not the second hypothesis. These results led to a more sophisticated performance theory which was supported by a path analysis. The potential moderating effects of other task characteristics were discussed, and several means of dealing with methodological difficulties arising from the interactive effects of task characteristics were suggested.

This paper reports results from a series of studies designed to directly test a categorization-based model of leadership perceptions in three areas: specifying the internal structure of leadership categories, investigating the accessibility and importance of various individual behaviors in making leadership judgments, and explaining leadership perception in terms of categorization. In Study 1, data provided by 263 subjects were used to calculate three measures of category representativeness: family resemblance scores, cue validity scores, and prototypicality ratings. Results showed that leader family resemblance, cue validity, and prototypicality were all strongly correlated. In Study 2, accessibility was investigated by administering to 64 subjects a specially constructed questionnaire containing leader behaviors which varied in prototypicality and then measuring the reaction time to rate the behavior as prototypical of a leader. Results showed that there was a significant negative correlation between prototypicality and reaction time to behavioral items, suggesting that more prototypical items were more easily accessed. Study 3 manipulated prototypicality of leadership behaviors for an experimental group where leadership had been primed extensively and for a group of subjects who had been given no primes. The results showed the prototypicality manipulation strongly affected leadership ratings, behavioral expectations, and causal ascriptions to the target person, but the priming factor had no significant effects on dependent variables. Suggestions for future research and practical implications are also discussed.

Three situational variables, task interdependence, temporal phase, and cognitive heterogeneity were hypothesized to affect the occurrence of leadership behavior and to moderate the relation between leadership behavior and performance. Results from a laboratory study of problem solving in four-person groups indicated that leadership behaviors which promote coordination were more frequent and were more highly correlated with performance on tasks with high interdependence. Phase related changes in the amount and the instrumentality of behavior were generally nonsignificant. The cognitive heterogeneity of group members bore an inconsistent relation to behavior and performance. Heterogeneity on a reflective/active dimension was negatively related to amount of leadership behavior and to performance; whereas heterogeneity on an abstract/concrete dimension was positively related to behavior and performance. Both dimensions exhibited significant moderating effects on the relation of one behavior (developing orientation) to performance.

It has been suggested that questionnaire-based measures of leadership behavior reflect not only ratee behavior, but also a systematic bias introduced by the perceptual-memory processes of raters (Rush, M. C., Thomas, J. C., & Lord, R. G. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 1977, 20, 93–110). This study experimentally manipulated both stimulus behavior and performance cues to examine their joint effect on LBDQ leadership ratings. Results showed highly significant main effects for both the performance cue and the stimulus behavior manipulations, but a nonsignificant interaction. The generalizability of these results to applied settings and their implications for leadership research employing questionnaire measures of behavior were carefully considered. Several possible means of reducing contextually related biases in future studies of leadership were suggested.

Most of the research on goal setting has focused on the relationship between goals and subsequent performance. Much less research has been directed at explaining why goal setting works or at integrating it with other motivational theories. In this paper a control systems model of motivation is developed in which a goal is considered a referent or desired state to which performance is compared. Any discrepancy (error) between goals and performance creates a corrective motivation. Predictions based on this model are tested in a classroom situation using a longitudinal research design involving 188 college students. Results support many aspects of the proposed model. It is concluded that goal setting should be viewed as a dynamic process in which both self-set goals and environmental feedback are incorporated into a system that monitors performance relative to a desired state and adjusts subsequent goals, behaviors, and strategies.

The potential importance of causal ascriptions in determining perceptions of leadership were investigated. Observer—subjects (N = 128) viewed one of two videotapes of the same four-person problem solving group with the salience of the group's leader, the existence of alternative causal explanations for performance, and the group's performance being manipulated. Although causal ascriptions and perceptions of leadership were each affected by the experimental manipulations as hypothesized, our results suggested that explicit causal analyses were unnecessary for explaining leadership perceptions. The data appeared to be more consistent with cognitive categorization processes that have recently been proposed as a model of leadership perceptions.

This study focused on the role of member familiarity and the nature of performance cues as determinants of the relation between performance information and group process ratings. Specifically, groups performed three 1-hr experimental tasks on separate days and were given bogus performance feedback indicating either poor, poor, poor; poor, good, poor; good, poor, good; or good, good, good performance for the three tasks. Since group members were moderately familiar, no difference in process perceptions among the four experimental conditions should occur if low familiarity is a necessary requirement for performance cue effects; however, if the nature of the performance cues is a crucial factor, perceptions of group processes should differ among feedback conditions. Results clearly indicate that the nature of the performance cue, not familiarity among raters, is the crucial variable. Differences among performance conditions produced significant distortions in 14 of 23 perceptual items. Moreover, in each case the significant differences could be explained by a linear trend indicating that the favorableness of process ratings increased with the favorableness of performance feedback.