Leader prototypicality in the German Police Forces and its effect on endorsement and trust

When questioning the efficacy and endorsement of leaders in public organizations, both indi-vidual and group based factors have to be considered. An individual leader’s level of power has been one influential factor shown to... [ view full abstract ]

When questioning the efficacy and endorsement of leaders in public organizations, both indi-vidual and group based factors have to be considered. An individual leader’s level of power has been one influential factor shown to influence the way he or she perceives the environ-ment and acts towards colleagues and employees. Although organizational and psychological research has focused on power as an individual variable, operationalization of power must always include an interpersonal component – you cannot possess power with no one to con-trol. In more recent years social psychologists have studied the effect of leader prototypicality on followers’ judgments. This two-step empirical study aims to combine power and prototypi-cality in explaining which kind of leader is more readily endorsed in public sector organiza-tions. By choosing a police setting, we investigate this issue in a public organization character-ized by a strong organizational culture, clear hierarchical structures and bureaucratically de-termined control, in which leader prototypicality should be of great importance, although these interpersonal effects may be observable in a manifold of settings.
First, a pre-study seeks to generate a full picture of a prototypical leader in police organiza-tions. For this purpose an extensive list of adjectives, derived from the literature, was given to 34 top-level police managers, who selected the adjectives that best and least described a prototypical leader.
Second, in an experimental study, vignettes describing four different types of police leaders (very prototypical x high power; very prototypical x low power; not prototypical x high power; not prototypical x low power) are employed in a between subjects design. Police officers are hypothesized to endorse the prototypical leader above the non-prototypical leader. Besides this main effect, non-prototypical, powerful leaders are hypothesized to be endorsed the least, whilst prototypical leaders’ power would not influence the degree of endorsement. Our sample consists of 190 police officers currently in training to fill leadership positions in the German police forces.
Our pre-study suggests a methodological approach to measuring leader prototypicality in public organizations, whilst the experimental study introduces the psychological concepts of power and leader prototypicality to leadership research in the public domain and seeks to provide interesting insights into the complex relationship between these factors.