Follower Mental Models and Outstanding Leadership

Abstract

Charismatic, ideological, and pragmatic (CIP) leaders use different mental models to understand and interpret the world. The present study uses this framework to gain a better understanding of how outstanding leaders interact and influence both proximal and distal followers. Participants engaged in a low-fidelity simulation, and their subsequent mental models and performance were analyzed to answer several research questions. First, how does leadership style influence creative outcomes? And second, how does leader-follower congruence of mental models relate to performance? These research questions were tested using a low-fidelity situation calling for creative problem-solving. Results indicate that leadership style does not have differential effects on follower performance but does interact with leader distance such that followers of charismatic leaders perform better with a low leader distance and followers of pragmatic leaders perform better with a higher leader distance. Lastly, mental model congruence may have some effects on the performance of followers. The implications of these findings for theory and practice are discussed.