Events

Ms. Xing WANG
PhD Candidate in Organizational Behavior and Human Resources
Department of Managerial Studies
University of Illinois Chicago

Seeking help from followers is a common leadership practice that confers instrumental benefits to leaders. However, a systematic understanding of its potential downsides and the critical contingencies is largely lacking. Integrating attribution theory with the social cost perspective of help-seeking, we incorporate employee attributions into our model of leader help-seeking to shed light on when this practice may backfire. Moreover, we link leader help-seeking to employee negative gossip through the mediating role of perceived leader effectiveness to explicate the social and reputational costs of leader help-seeking. In Study 1, we collect qualitative data and identify three distinct attributions that employees make for leader help-seeking: leader overwhelming workload attributions, leader ineptitude attributions, and employee competence attributions. In Study 2, we conduct a time-separated field study to test our research model. The results support our hypotheses that employees’ reactions to leader help-seeking are contingent upon their attributions. Leader overwhelming workload attributions buffer the negative impact of leader help-seeking on employees’ perceptions of leader effectiveness, whereas leader ineptitude attributions accentuate the negative relationship between leader help-seeking and perceived leader effectiveness. Furthermore, perceived leader effectiveness is negatively associated with negative gossip targeted toward leaders. The theoretical implications of our findings are discussed.