Is What We See What We Get? Rethinking Prototypical Leadership

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted traditional workplace channels by restricting social interaction. This disruption exposed the vulnerability of boundary roles and forced leaders to confront extraordinary challenges under unfavorable conditions. The global crisis enriched organizational leadership scholarship and practice by challenging long-standing assumptions about leadership traits and behavior. We examine contemporary leadership theories using an integrative literature review. We synthesize diverse concepts of leader effectiveness through the lens of Implicit Leader Theories (ILTs), which depend upon the organizational culture and context, and present our findings as a conceptual model for use as a heuristic tool by scholar-practitioners. Our research identified a reciprocal relationship between ILTs and leadership traits. ILTs form through a three-step sensemaking process that shapes individual values, attitudes, work intentions, and behaviors. Such implicit leadership theories guide the collective evaluation of leader effectiveness by informing the archetypes of how a leader should behave and what a leader should be. When actual leader traits manifest, the sensemaking process evaluates effectiveness to rationalize such behaviors, thereby refining the collective ILT. Our research extends scholarly understanding of leadership theories by integrating multiple streams into a unified, contingency-oriented conceptual model for scholar-practitioners.