Separating and Integrating Personal and Positional Leader Credibility: Concept and Scale Development

Leader credibility is considered important for successful leadership. Yet the inconsistent conceptual basis of the concept hampers the possibility to build systematic accumulative knowledge. This article argues that we need to separate leader credibility into personal and positional leader credibility. Personal leader credibility concerns how followers perceive the alignment of words and actions of the person being their manager. Positional leader credibility relates to how followers perceive the capabilities and reputation of the leadership position to follow through on stated intentions. Further, this article develops measurement-scales for personal and positional leader credibility. Factor analysis on data from 1,115 Danish high school teachers shows that it is not only theoretically but also empirically possible to distinguish between personal and positional leader credibility. The article demonstrates the relevance of leader credibility by showing that both credibility concepts relate to public service motivation. The findings replicate on a sample of 578 occupational therapists working in the health care sector. The discussion highlights that leader credibility may be even more important than it is currently considered because it concerns not just the leader as a person or the leadership position, but both. Thus, future studies are encouraged to integrate both perspectives.