Developing leadership aspirations

A vast quantity of research has examined leadership outcomes, leadership effectiveness and leadership emergence, but there is less literature that explores why people want to become leaders and the factors that promote or develop aspirations to lead. This study, examined the role of individual differences (extraversion, conscientiousness and self-leadership) experiences with one’s leader or manager (transformational leadership and leader-member exchange), and broader organisational factors (perceived organisational support and psychological empowerment), as predictors of leader aspirations. A group of 109 employed students completed a selfreport survey about their personal characteristics, their leader and their workplace. Results of a hierarchical regression analysis revealed that employees’ perceptions of their leader and organisational factors explained a significant amount of additional variance in leader aspirations over and above individual factors. These findings support the idea of taking a multi-level approach to leadership aspirations and leadership in general.