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Date of Award
2020
Document Type
Restricted Thesis: Campus only access
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Leadership Studies
First Advisor
Dr. Haley Harwell
Abstract
Economists value leadership for its ability to mitigate coordination failure in social dilemmas. While leaders are used as coordination devices, the experimental economics literature does not examine how much followers attribute their decision-making to the leader’s differential influence as opposed to incentives for cooperation found within the strategic environment. This paper classifies two key components of leadership models across the literature, asymmetric advantages and strategies, and poses ways that economists might consider modeling leadership through a more integrative approach of the followership. Investigating how followers perceive the legitimacy of a leader can help nuance results on leader effectiveness, and distinguish the leader’s differential influence from that of conditional cooperation and implicit biases.
Recommended Citation
Jaeger, Samantha M., "Follow the Leader or Follow the Strategy? The role of perceived legitimacy in evaluating leader effectiveness" (2020). Honors Theses. 1488.
https://scholarship.richmond.edu/honors-theses/1488