Following Your Ideal Leader: Implicit Public Leadership Theories, Leader—Member Exchange, and Work Engagement

• Published date: 01 December 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00910260241249146
• Author: Laura Hesmert,Rick Vogel
• Date: 01 December 2024

https://doi.org/10.1177/00910260241249146

Public Personnel Management

2024, Vol. 53(4) 548 –571

© The Author(s) 2024

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DOI: 10.1177/00910260241249146

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Article

Following Your Ideal Leader:

Implicit Public Leadership

Theories, Leader—Member

Exchange, and Work

Engagement

Laura Hesmert1 and Rick Vogel1

Abstract

Although social comparisons are ubiquitous in leadership, previous scholarship in

public administration has not yet studied comparative aspects of how followers

perceive and respond to leadership. This study addresses this gap and disentangles

the link between leadership and work engagement from a socio-cognitive and

relational perspective. It examines how public employees compare their real

leaders against ideal leaders and how perceived gaps between both affect their work

engagement through leader–member exchange (LMX). Building on leadership and

job demands–resources theory, a priming study using the Semantic Misattribution

Procedure (SMP) extracts participants’ Implicit Public Leadership Theories.

Structural equation modeling reveals that work engagement is substantially higher

(lower) when characteristics of the supervisor resonate with positive (negative)

prototypes of ideal leaders, with this association being fully mediated by LMX.

The study shows how implicit information processing matters for the emergence

of leader–follower relationships and, in turn, for important follower outcomes. It

thus contributes to, and combines, a socio-cognitive and a relational approach to

leadership in the public sector.

Keywords

work engagement, implicit public leadership theories, LMX, semantic misattribution

procedure

1Universität Hamburg, Germany

Corresponding Author:

Rick Vogel, Department of Socioeconomics, Universität Hamburg, Von-Melle-Park 9, 20146 Hamburg,

Germany.

Email: rick.vogel@uni-hamburg.de

1249146PPMXXX10.1177/00910260241249146Public Personnel ManagementHesmert and Vogel

research-article2024

Hesmert and Vogel 549

Introduction

The visibility of leaders in the organizational hierarchy and their exposure to followers

make them easy targets of comparison. Consciously or not, followers compare their

leaders with those of their colleagues in other teams, they compare their current leader

with his or her predecessor in the same position, or they compare their leaders in their

current and former jobs within or outside the organization (Festinger, 1954; Greenberg

et al., 2007). As with any human cognition (Fiske & Taylor, 2017; Kahneman, 2013),

followers’ social comparisons of leaders reside to considerable extents at levels below

full consciousness, which makes them inevitable to occur but difficult to observe.

Nevertheless, many leaders will know, or at least have a hunch, that followers compare

them with others because they do the same with their own leaders.

Scholarship in public administration (PA) has recently advanced along these lines

and explored deeper into the socio-cognitive foundations of public leadership (Hesmert

et al., 2022; Vogel & Werkmeister, 2021). This research suggests that comparisons are

not limited to real leaders whom followers met in person or know more distantly from

media or stories, but followers might also compare their leaders with ideal leaders (van

Quaquebeke et al., 2014). Ideal leaders are abstract images of successful leaders with

prototypical characteristics, regardless of whether these characteristics occur in a real

leader of whom followers think (Junker & van Dick, 2014; Lord et al., 2020).

While previous research has extracted prototypes of public leaders (Vogel &

Werkmeister, 2021), no prior study has examined how these implicit theories feed into

social comparisons of leaders at the workplace and what consequences these compari-

sons have. Depending on the leader prototypes that followers bring to their jobs, they

will evaluate leaders against different standards. Real leaders are likely to live up to

these standards and match the characteristics of ideal leaders to very different extents.

The consequences for the relationship between leaders and followers are unclear: On

the one hand, perceived gaps between the real and ideal leader may be detrimental to

the quality of the exchange because followers find their expectations toward a leader

disappointed, which lowers the potential to identify with him or her and, in turn, to

develop a high-quality relationship (Epitropaki & Martin, 2005). On the contrary, a

perceived mismatch between the real and ideal leader may not be harmful and even

improve the exchange because imperfection makes leaders more authentic and

approachable (Diddams & Chang, 2012), thus reducing the social distance between

leader and follower.

Given the strong evidence for beneficial follower outcomes of high-quality rela-

tionships between leaders and followers (Martin et al., 2016), the question of whether

and how LMX is contingent on followers’ comparisons of real with ideal leaders

deserves scholarly and practical attention. The research question of this study thus

reads:

How does the match between public employees’ real and ideal leaders affect LMX

and, in turn, their engagement at work?