Brokering Trust to Enhance Leadership: A Self-Monitoring Approach to Leadership Emergence

What kind of person is likely to emerge as an informal leader in the workplace? Experimental research shows that high self-monitors—who tend to adjust their attitudes and behaviors to the demands of different situations—emerge as informal leaders in temporary groups. By contrast, low self-monitors—who tend to be true to themselves in terms of consistency in attitudes and behaviors across different situations—are less likely to emerge as leaders. But this prior research does not address the criticism that the emergence of high self-monitors as leaders represents ephemeral impression management in the context of laboratory experiments. To address this issue, we collected and analyzed data from a 116-member high-technology firm. Our results show that self-monitoring is related not only to leadership emergence, but also to the provision of advice to co-workers. Further, people who occupied brokerage positions (being trusted by those who did not trust each other) tended to be seen as leaders if they were high rather than low self-monitors. From these results, we build a picture of the high self-monitoring emergent leader as someone who notices problems and ameliorates them through the provision of advice and the brokerage of relationships across social divides. The occupation of a structurally advantageous position may well be more advantageous for some (i.e., high self-monitors) relative to others (i.e., low self-monitors)

Comparison of Absolute Thresholds Derived from an Adaptive Forced-Choice Procedure and from Reaction Probabilities and Reaction Times in a Simple Reaction Time Paradigm

An understanding of the auditory system's operation requires knowledge of the mechanisms underlying thresholds. In this work we compare detection thresholds obtained with a three-interval-three-alternative forced-choice paradigm with reaction thresholds extracted from both reaction probabilities (RP) and reaction times (RT) in a simple RT paradigm from the same listeners under otherwise nearly identical experimental conditions. Detection thresholds, RP, and RT to auditory stimuli exhibited substantial variation from session to session. Most of the intersession variation in RP and RT could be accounted for by intersession variation in a listener's absolute sensitivity. The reaction thresholds extracted from RP were very similar, if not identical, to those extracted from RT. On the other hand, reaction thresholds were always higher than detection thresholds. The difference between the two thresholds can be considered as the additional amount of evidence required by each listener to react to a stimulus in an unforced design on top of that necessary for detection in the forced-choice design. This difference is inversely related to the listener's probability of producing false alarms. We found that RT, once corrected for some irreducible minimum RT, reflects the time at which a given stimulus reaches the listener's reaction threshold. This suggests that the relationships between simple RT and loudness (reported in the literature) are probably caused by a tight relationship between temporal summation at threshold and temporal summation of loudness