Ask and You Shall Receive? How Leader Development Proactivity Impacts Leader Development Opportunities

The leader development literature has paid considerable attention to the outcomes of leader development activities; however, this has come at the expense of understanding how leader development is allocated. Yet, those studies that do examine such allocation have focused on either the organization or the employee as the source of development. Challenging this implicit dichotomy, I propose a new behavioral construct, Leader Development Proactivity (LDP; an employee’s request for leader development opportunities and resources), that I propose is evaluated by organizational decision makers in allocating developmental resources – thus suggesting that individual behavior must be viewed in light of organizational evaluations. Integrating social exchange theory and implicit leadership theory with an overarching perspective on proactivity, I propose that LDP cues two distinct patterns of evaluation of the proactive employee. Building upon social exchange theory, I posit that LDP will positively influence the degree to which the employee is perceived as psychologically entitled to the extent that the employee and decision maker have a low quality social exchange relationship. Regarding implicit leadership theory, LDP should increase perceptions of the employee as prototypical of the leader role, but this effect should be conditional on the degree of deep-level similarity between the employee and decision maker. In turn, both perceptions of psychological entitlement and leader prototypicality should be negatively and positively associated, respectively, with the amount of leader development received by the focal employee. I test these predictions across three studies: two experimental studies and a lagged field study, in addition to a construct validity study. Results taken from these studies provide mixed support for my theorized model. Specifically, while these three studies provided generally consistent support for my predictions linking LDP to development through leader prototypicality, the moderating effects of social exchange quality and deep-level similarity received less support. Implications for both theory and practice are discussed