Exploring the context-embedded nature of followership
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Contemporary theorizing positions leadership and followership as emergent roles that co-evolve out of a shared understanding of who will lead and who will follow in a given social interaction (Uhl-Bien et al., 2014). Based on this social constructivist viewpoint, the notion that followership represents a static role dictated by hierarchical boundaries is oversimplified, and followership is better understood as a dynamic process that is contextually-situated. Thus, the purpose of our study was to explore how interpretations of followership differ across the contexts in which sport teams operate. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with fourteen coaches of Canadian Interuniversity Sport teams to capture contextually-situated descriptions of followership. The conduct and corresponding analysis of interviews were guided by Srivastava and Hopwood’s (2009) reflexive iterative framework. The thematic analysis revealed several personality characteristics that were consistently described in relation to ideal followership (i.e., active independent thought, balanced processing of information, collective orientation, relational transparency). Coaches noted, however, that the perceived utility of followership behaviours depended upon contextual boundaries including the performance demands of a given situation, whether interactions were in public or private, and the topic under discussion (e.g., personnel decisions were often non-negotiable). Followership expectations also differed according to the interpersonal dynamics at play, which included the relative status of individuals involved in the leader-follower interaction and their relationship history. Despite coaches’ precision in specifying how their expectations of followership differed across contexts, six coaches indicated that they never explicitly broached the topic of followership with their teams. Nevertheless, coaches’ interpretations of followership offer insight into the context-embedded nature of followership and elucidate how acts of followership are implicated in the leadership process. Conceptual considerations for future work examining followership in sport are discussed in relation to the extant theories of followership in organizational contexts. Acknowledgments: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".