Take a 'selfie' : examining how leaders emerge from leader self-awareness, self-leadership, and self-efficacy

It is important to understand the processes behind how and why individuals emerge as leaders, so that the best and most capable individuals may occupy leadership positions. So far, most literature in this area has focused on individual characteristics, such as personality or cognitive ability. While interactions between individuals and context do get research attention, we still lack a comprehensive understanding of how the social context at work may help individuals to emerge as leaders. Such knowledge could make an important contribution toward getting the most capable, rather than the most dominant or narcissistic individuals, into leadership positions. In the present work, we contribute toward closing this gap by testing a mediation chain linking a leader's leader self-awareness to a follower's leadership emergence with two time-lagged studies (nstudy1 = 449, nstudy2 = 355). We found that the leader's leader self-awareness was positively related to (a) the follower's leadership emergence and (b) the follower's nomination for promotion and that both relationships were serially mediated by the follower's self-leadership and the follower's leader self-efficacy. We critically discuss our findings and provide ideas for future research. Nanyang Technological University Published version The data collection in Study 1 was funded by the Willkomm Stiftung and the Department of Social Psychology at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany together with the Center for Leadership and Strategic Thinking at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, USA. The data collection Study 2 was funded by the Center for Leadership and Strategic Thinking at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, USA, together with Nanyang Technological University in Nanyang, Singapore. Publishing fees are funded by the Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany.