Leader-Follower Development: The Relationship Between Followers

Leader-Follower Development: The Relationship Between Followers’ Perception of a Leaders’ Implicit Followership Theory and Psychological Empowerment 

Lance Patrick Reichenberger | 2023

Abstract 

In the post-COVID-19 workplace, the devastation to the supply chain and corporate boards turned upside down as the world went home to work. Understanding and nurturing the leader-follower relationship is required for organizations to survive such challenges. It is time to put the followers first instead of the shareholders, as the followers bring success to the shareholder. This is the first empirical study focused on the human resource side of the business by expanding the critical follower-centered theories. The implicit followership theory (IFT) and concept of psychological empowerment (PE) can change how organizations attract, maintain, and grow their teams. The current dissertation was designed and undertaken to prove a relationship between IFT and PE to determine how to psychologically empower followers through a thorough understanding and growth of the post-millennial generations. This dissertation was designed as a quantitative correlation study with 24 hypotheses tested. The dissertation required a minimum of 128 respondents, as estimated using G*Power. A complex SurveyMonkey questionnaire was created and distributed via targeted emails, social media campaigns, and Slack direct to leaders and managers in the technology industry. The managers completed and IFT Likert scale instrument for each of their followers they chose to include in the research, and the followers completed a PE Likert scale instrument survey. To statistically aggregate the data received from the surveys, I used IBM’s SPSS software. The results from SPSS showed that a few variables and hypotheses were statistically significant and correlated, ranging from -.3 to .92 with a p < .05 within the Good Citizen, Conformity, and Insubordination of the IFT. These findings proved that the leader’s perception of their followers and the follower’s direct report of their PE are associated. The results determined that organizations and academia can benefit from the study, catapulting followership and leadership homogeny.