University of North Carolina at Greensboro, United States
Change-oriented leadership, a distinct meta-category in the hierarchical taxonomy of effective leadership, serves primarily to promote change by envisioning a positive future. Recently, scholars have developed a new construct of change-oriented leadership that is negative-focused, namely vigilant leadership, which has demonstrated its unique effectiveness in facilitating follower proactivity at work. In this research, we advance this line of research by examining the multilevel mechanisms and boundary conditions of vigilant leadership’s effects on follower proactivity. In Study 1, we conducted a two-wave field study with 498 employees and their 89 leaders. The results suggest that vigilant leadership is positively related to follower individual proactivity and team proactivity through activating followers’ felt responsibility for change and team reflexibility, respectively. In Study 2, an experimental vignette study, we further investigated the boundary condition of vigilant leadership. Specifically, the results suggest that vigilant leadership’s positive effect on follower proactivity is more pronounced in teams that have recently experienced successes rather than failures. This effect can be explained by vigilant leadership’s ability to elicit followers’ non-complacency about the status quo, an alternative form of felt responsibility for change. With these findings, we contribute to leadership literature by shedding light on how vigilant leadership operates to steer employees towards challenging the status quo and engaging in proactive behaviors, especially in the aftermath of successes.
