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Context Effects in Leadership Perception

Krannert Graduate School of Management, Purdue University, cindy{at}mgmt.purdue.edu

In this study, participants perceived the same job candidate to display more leader qualities when his potential group was a troubled one rather than a tranquil one. They described this person more favorably as a leader and falsely recognized him as having performed more leadership-consistent and fewer leadership-irrelevant behaviors in a test of recognition memory. Using Jacoby’s process-dissociation procedure, the author discovered that unconscious (rather than conscious) memory processes completely mediated this context effect—a mediation indicative of either postconscious or goal-dependent context effects in leadership perception. Previous studies have demonstrated that context affects perceptions of incumbent leaders. This study demonstrates that context also can affect perceptions of potential leaders, with a troubled context magnifying those qualities that are consistent with individuals’ implicit theories and romanticized conceptions of leadership.

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