Extending Our Understanding of How Follower Political Skill Influences Leadership Ratings

We explored the role of followers’ political skill in the appraisal of leadership behaviors. We discovered across several experimental vignette-based studies that politically skilled participants reported higher ratings of transformational leadership behaviors regardless of what type of leader behavior they were presented with. In efforts to explain this unexpected discovery, we turned to the meta-analytic framework of political skill to examine the mechanisms through which political skill may be associated with ratings of leaders’ behaviors. Results from an additional field study suggest that followers’ instrumentality perceptions in part explain the positive associations between followers’ political skill and their ratings of transformational leadership behaviors. With these discoveries, we extend our understanding of how follower characteristics influence leadership evaluations, thereby contributing to both the political skill and broader leadership literature. Practitioners and researchers alike may benefit from considering these deliberate and inadvertent influences when they rely on followers’ assessments of their leaders.