Multilevel Investigation of Leadership Prototype Perception: Political Behavior in Relation to Effectiveness and Trust

Background/Purpose Empirical evidence suggests that a leader’s political skills may act as a moderator that might decrease the effect of prototypicality’s impact on trust and on leadership effectiveness. The study investigated leading political skills as second-level regulatory variables in connection to leader effectiveness and trust with the purpose of testing a cross-level moderated mediation model within a traditionally collectivist culture like Turkey in efforts to contextualize and expand understanding of leadership prototype perception. Methods A total of 442 service sector employees and 28 executive managers were interviewed. Two surveys in two separate time periods were conducted. Multilevel path analysis was used to evaluate the hypotheses. Results The findings suggest that there is a strong and significant impact of leader prototypicality on leadership effectiveness and a direct impact on trust. Results indicate that leaders who are trusted by their subordinates are perceived as more effective in their leadership roles. Lower levels of trust from subordinates are negatively associated with leader effectiveness. Conclusion If leaders cannot provide their followers a contextualized sense of empowerment and development, they are perceived to not provide high levels of emotional trust. Therefore, there is greater need for multilevel contextualized studies taking account of collective, two-sided, embedded experiences within groups.