Fairness and other leadership heuristics: A four-nation study

Abstract

Leaders' fairness may be just one of several heuristicscognitive shortcutsthat followers use to decide quickly whether they can rely on a given leader to lead them to ends that are good for the collective, rather than just good for the leader. Other leadership heuristics might include leader prototypicality and leader self-sacrifice. We hypothesized that if these other factors do function as leadership heuristics they would interact with fairness such that the correlation of fairness with leadership evaluations would be lower when either of the other factors was high. In two studies, both using the Lind-Sitkin Multiple Domain Leadership Instrument, we measured followers' impressions of their supervisors' interactional fairness, and prototypicality, and their leadership evaluations and ratings of team community; in Study 2 we also measured impressions of leaders' sacrifice. To test the generality of the phenomena, Study 1 included data from respondents in the US, India, and Germany; Study 2 included data from respondents in New Zealand and the US. The results supported the hypotheses.