Isopraxis leadership: leader confidence, managerial strategy and organizational performance

摘要

Attention has been given to the notion that organizational leaders’ expressed confidence and optimismudregarding their organizations’ performance can affect that performance by increasing the motivation and/or selfefficacyudof subordinates. This idea, a part of various leadership theories, we call “isopraxis leadership.” This paperudexamines the logic of the claim, reviews and critiques extant evidence, develops a measure of leader confidenceud(the starting point for isopraxis leadership), undertakes initial validation of the measure, and then tests for the linkudbetween leader confidence and performance among several hundred public organizations. Leader confidence isudfound to be largely unrelated to performance; some evidence indicates that it can help only for those organizationsudthat are already doing well or have more resources than average – that is, where it is least needed.