Followership and the Federal Worker

Abstract

In 1933, in a lecture delivered at the Department of Business Administration of the London School of Economics and Political Science, Mary Parker Follett stated: . . let me speak to you for a moment about something of the utmost importance, but which has been far too little considered, and that is the part of the followers in the situation. Their part is not merely to follow, they have a very active to play and that is to keep the leader in control of a situation (Follett, 1949). Follett was perhaps the first modern management scholar to focus on the paucity of information and lack of attention given to followership. Interestingly, she was also the very first to focus on as a special and interdependent (as opposed to the dependent) in the supervisor-subordinate team. She also noted its significance in determining work-group behaviors and overall organizational performance. Follett stressed that it is the dynamic between the leader and follower that is critical and that enables the team to dominate situations, not the of the leader to dominate the follower. Ironically, this compelling original argument has for the most part been ignored. It is only in the past two decades that researchers have rediscovered and some have even suggested that may be a consequence of subordinate behavior (Herold, 1977; Harris and Lim, 1969). Heller and Van Til, in their analysis of the supervisor-subordinate team, have indicated that the study of the follower, in particular, has been largely neglected (Heller and Van Til, 1982). Callahan, Fleenor, and Knudson, in their review of and power, state that the of subordinates is a relatively unresearched area of leadership (Callahan, Fleenor, and Knudson, 1986). While the reasons for this neglect are numerous, two major sources stand out: obsession with the romance of leadership and dependence on the ability to motivate. Followership, even if it started out on equal terms, has been completely dwarfed by leadership. As Meindl et al. have suggested in a recent overview on the prominence of leadership, management and organizational behavior literature have been dominated by the concept of which, in their words, has assumed a romanticized, larger than life role (Meindl et al., 1985). The management literature abounds with studies of characteristics, dimensions, and interventions reflecting the belief that it is (good or bad) that largely explains organizational outcomes. * This article attempts to define followership in the workplace. Of particular focus is the federal worker and how he or she compares to workers in other governmental and private sector settings. Eight empirically derived dimensions of followership are identified: (1) partnership; (2) motivation; (3) competence; (4) sense of humor; (5) dependability; (6) positive working relations; (7) speaking up; and (8) proper comportment. These dimensions are associated with workers who are most productive and are viewed to be the best performers on supervisors' teams. When federal workers were compared to nonfederal workers, the federal workers were found to score lower in four followership dimensions: partnership; motivation; competence; and proper comportment. The lag of federal subordinates in these identified dimensions of followership, which are tied to productivity and performance, are explored both in terms of possible causes and implications for federal work settings. It is suggested that the differences are attributable to organizational size and the less personal, more formal characteristics that are inherent in large organizations.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 35 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.