The impact of positivity and transparency on trust in leaders and their perceived effectiveness

By Steven M. Norman, Bruce J. Avolio, Fred Luthans. Leadership Quarterly, 2010

463 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract A critical challenge facing today's organizational leaders is gaining their followers' trust and having them view leaders as effective in addressing turmoil and change. Using a downsizing scenario as the context, this field experiment examined how a leader's positivity and transparency impacted followers' perceived trust, defined in terms of willingness to be vulnerable, and effectiveness of their leader. To test the hypotheses, 304 participants were randomly assigned to one of the four conditions of high (low) leader positivity × high (low) leader transparency. Results of our mixed methods study indicated both the leader's level of positivity and transparency impacted followers' perceived trust and evaluations of leader effectiveness. Besides limitations and suggestions for future research, we conclude with the practical implications that positive, transparent leaders may have on building trust and perceived effectiveness among their followers.

Subfields: Demography, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ccf82a6804f9f6923e1f373e1a23769b12413714

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Demography

1. David L. Collinson
2. M. Saunders
3. G. Dietz
4. A. Thornhill
5. H. Erkutlu
6. Usman Raja
7. Dan-Shang Wang
8. Lu Wang

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

1. D. Bouckenooghe
2. Usman Raja
3. G. Dietz
4. David L. Collinson
5. M. Saunders
6. A. Thornhill
7. A. Zafar
8. Hui Wang

Citations in the corpus

• Impact of authentic leadership on performance: Role of followers' positive psychological capital and relational processes (2014, background): “Third, authentic leaders share information with their followers in an open and transparent manner, that is, they transparently convey their attributes, values, aspirations, and weakness to followers, and encourage them to do likewise, thus fostering trust and intimacy with followers (Avolio et al., ”
• Does Anger Expression Help or Harm Leader Effectiveness? The Role of Competence-based versus Integrity-based Violations and Abusive Supervision (2017, methodology): “We adapted measures from Madera and Smith (2009) and Norman, Avolio, and Luthans (2010) to assess participants’ evaluations of the leader’s effectiveness.”
• Prozac leadership and the limits of positive thinking (2012, methodology): “They only had the limited information provided by the researchers, trust was based on first impressions, there were no real consequences of leaders’ actions, and face-to-face interaction was absent, as the experiment was conducted on-line (Norman et al., 2010: 360).”
• Authentic Leadership Perception, Trust in the Leader, and Followers’ Emotions in Organizational Change Processes (2016, background): “Followers’ trust in their organizational leaders has become an important issue (Norman et al., 2010), and managers should be aware of the important consequences their behavior has on employees’ level of trust.”