Chapter 17: Academic Leadership: The Effect of Leader-Follower Incongruence and Cognitive Processes on Perceptions of Leader Adversity

While intentionally destructive leadership has received a reasonable amount of theoretical and some empirical attention (e.g., Illies & Reiter-Palmon, 2008; Padilla, Hogan, & Keiser, 2007), a theoretical insight and empirical research investigating factors that contribute to destructive appraisal of not deliberately harmful leader behavior are largely lacking. In fact, the majority of leadership research tends to focus on leader behaviors that are more or less effective for organizations (Schilling, 2009). This line of research often assumes that ineffective and counter productive leadership (i.e., destructive leadership) is evidenced by the absence of effective leader behaviors (Ashforth, 1994; Bryman, 2007). However, research investigating destructive aspects of leadership (Ash-forth, 1994; Einarsen, Aasland, & Skogstard, 2007; Tepper, 2000) and cognitive leadership research (Epitropaki & Martin, 2004; Lord, Brown, Harvey, & Hall, 2001; Ritter & Lord, 2007) suggest that ineffective leadership is: (a) not limited to the absence of effective behaviors, (b) not limited to intentional behaviors, (c) influenced by experience with significant others and, (d) often misevaluated due to cognitive biases, implicit assumptions and environmental constraints. Consequently, an interesting question that should be posed with respect to leadership is “not so much what leaders should do, but […] what they should avoid doing” (Bryman, 2007, p. 707). In other words, shifting the focus from effectiveness to ineffectiveness, with simultaneous attention to rendering processes that label a leader as adverse, might be more crucial for the understanding of leadership. Thus, this chapter focuses on nondeliberate leader behaviors that can result in destructive outcomes in a specific context of academia. Specifically, we examine factors that lead followers to construct negative images of their leader resulting in adverse leadership perception. However, though this chapter integrates prior research with findings from a qualitative study we conducted in the academic context, we believe that our exploratory analysis sheds some light on the aspects of leadership in similar organizational contexts that normally lie unexamined in every day interactions and therefore, result in adverse leadership perception. Finally, this chapter does not differentiate between specific types of academic leaders (e.g. a dean, a department chair) or specific types of leadership (e.g. administrative leadership). Although these types of differences are an interesting topic in itself, they are not the focus of this chapter. Rather, we refer to leadership in general terms as an influence relationship between leaders and followers (Yukl, 1998) and focus specifically on situational and cognitive factors that influence everyday leader-follower interactions that may result in adverse leadership perception.