Research Area 2

Do people lose respect for manager after witnessing others being rude to them? In this research, we hope to understand how viewing others’ interactions with a manager or supervisor changes subsequent evaluations of that manager or supervisor. In particular, seeing someone being impertinent may lead to a negative evaluation of that manager’s leadership competence while seeing someone being supportive may lead to a positive evaluation of that manager’s leadership ability.

Method: Participants read a chain of emails between a company director and their subordinates. They first read neutral emails which allowed for us to measure and control for their initial impressions of the leader’s legitimacy. Finally, they read an email in which one subordinate challenged the directors decisions, then rated the leader’s legitimacy again.

Results: Observers see a leader as less legitimate after witnessing a follower challenging them. We ran a 2-way ANOVA, controlling for participants’ initial impression of leader legitimacy, and found that there was no main effect of leader gender. And secondly, although challenging voice from a male follower is more damaging for legitimacy, this happens for male leaders rather than female leaders as we had originally predicted. In other words, men’s challenging voice has a greater impact than women’s challenging voice, but only against a leader who is also a man.