Toward an Information Processing Theory of Leadership Attribution: A Review and a Paradigm for Research.

摘要

Historically, leadership research has followed a cycle of extending, reworking, discarding and developing new ideas as the inadequacies and limitations of existing theories were realized. Calder (1977), Pfeffer (1977), and Mitchell, Larson and Green (1975) have all argued for the need to study leadership as a process of attribution. This paper presents the case for the study of leadership as an attribution process; reports on the results of two studies in which information processing models were developed of the attribution process in which individuals engage while rating peers on several sociometric measures of leadership; and proposes a paradigm for the study of the leadership attribution processes within actual organizational settings. (Author)