EAWOP Small Group Meeting on Negative Followership

Call for Papers:  EAWOP Small Group Meeting on Negative Followership

Date: September 11 – 13, 2014   Location:  Durham University Business School, UK

Organizers: Michael Knoll, Birgit Schyns, Robert G. Lord, Vicente González-Romá

Theme. Negative effects in organizations such as inefficacy, alienation, antisocial, and unethical behaviour have multiple antecedents. Leaders or people in management positions are seen as most culpable for such outcomes in both public discourse and organization research. However, recently the role of followers and followership in the emergence of negative effects in organizations also has been emphasized. The small group meeting aims at exploring the scope and the antecedents of negative followership.

Scope of negative followership. Followership can denote a role, relationship, and process. Research and theory suggest that followers (co)produce negative effects by acts of both commission and omission and through direct and indirect effects.

Antecedents of negative followership. The following three primary antecedents of follower role orientations have been addressed in the followership literature, but we welcome additional perspective.   

• First, leaders could contribute directly to the occurrence of negative followership, by instilling negative practices, modelling negative behaviours, or by creating a culture or climate that facilitates negative followership.
• Second, organizational factors could encourage negative followership through reward systems and diffusion of responsibility.
• Third, followers’ self-concept could contribute because of follower’s implicit theories regarding to leaders, followers, and their or because of the strategies followers use to deal with organizational demands.

Methodology. Methodological and conceptual issues will facilitate or inhibit research on scope and antecedents of negative followership. Consequently, more general contributions that address methodological issues are encouraged.

Nature of the Conference. The Small Group Meeting is a workshop over three days with no more than 20 paper presentations and plenty of time for discussions. We hope for a productive exchange of paradigms, approaches, and methods aiming at delineating the scope of negative followership and organize existing approaches to antecedents of negative followership. Because the negative effects of followership represent a relatively new research domain, the less formal format of a small group meeting would provide an important step towards developing this domain.

Cost:  No registration fee.  Lunch & snacks during the day will be covered by the EAWOP.

Submission of Abstracts:  Paper abstracts (up to 500 words) should be submitted by 30^th April, 2014 to michael.knoll@durham.ac.uk. Participants will be notified regarding the acceptance of their paper by June, 2014. Full papers should be submitted by August, 2014 so that they can be made available to all participants before the meeting.

Publication of Papers:  We are planning to publish selected papers in a special issue of an academic journal, e.g., EJWOP. Stay tuned for more specific information.