The impression management-emergent leadership relationship: The mediating role of trustworthiness

Recent research has greatly expanded our understanding of the element of emergent leadership (i.e., being perceived as “leaderlike”, despite a lack of formal status or authority), exploring a number of individual behaviors thought to impact team members’ perceptions of others as leaderlike. While growing attention to how individuals’ natural behaviors influence these emergent leadership perceptions has seen success, questions regarding the impact of strategically used behaviors remain. To better our understanding of how conscious attempts to influence others’ perceptions lead to informal leader emergence, I examine how different impression management tactics spark varying effects on these resulting perceptions. Further, I examine perceptions of trustworthiness as a mediating mechanism of this relationship and how an individual’s trait authenticity moderates subsequent leadership emergence. In doing so, I look to provide a link between signaling and social categorization theories to help show how calculated behaviors act as signals of attributes associated with perceived leaders.