Construct redundancy in leader behaviors: A review and agenda for the future

Leadership remains a popular and heavily researched area in the social sciences. Such popularity has led to a proliferation of new constructs within the leadership domain. Here, we argue that such construct proliferation without pruning is unhealthy and violates the principle of parsimony. Our purpo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Leadership quarterly 2018-02, Vol.29 (1), p.236-251
Main Authors: Banks, George C., Gooty, Janaki, Ross, Roxanne L., Williams, Courtney E., Harrington, Nicole T.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Behavior
Construct redundancy
Endogeneity bias
Leadership
Management styles
Meta-analysis
Parsimony
Redundancy
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Summary:Leadership remains a popular and heavily researched area in the social sciences. Such popularity has led to a proliferation of new constructs within the leadership domain. Here, we argue that such construct proliferation without pruning is unhealthy and violates the principle of parsimony. Our purpose was to examine construct redundancy via a comprehensive review of task-oriented, relational, passive, and inspirational leader behaviors as well as values-based and moral leadership behaviors. Our findings, as indexed via meta-analytic correlations, reveal that construct redundancy remains problematic for the leadership literature. In addition, many of the values-based and moral behavior models correlated heavily with constructs traditionally examined as outcome variables (e.g., trust, LMX, justice). Implications for future research are discussed in regards to construct redundancy and how to avoid endogeneity bias in primary studies in the leadership literature.
ISSN:1048-9843
1873-3409
DOI:10.1016/j.leaqua.2017.12.005