Building on DeRue and Ashford’s relational, resource-oriented view of leadership emergence, this study introduces a social information processing lens to enrich and extend their leading-following process model. Specifically, we propose that individual’s regulatory foci (promotion vs. prevention) shape how they selectively attend to and encode social cues in ways that influence claiming-granting behaviors and the emergence of collective leadership structures. We also consider how contextual factors, including affective features (e.g., in-group favoritism), task characteristics (e.g., task complexity), and events from the surrounding environment, further influence these social information processing dynamics. Finally, we discuss how the interplay of individual and collective regulatory focus evolves over team developmental stages, offering a pragmatic framework to unpack the nuances and intricacies of leadership emergence in teams.
