"Political Skill Dimensions, Enterprising Job Demands, and the Prediction of Leader Performance"

Leadership research has long recognized the value to leaders of appreciating the social aspects of work. Although recent research has shown political skill to be a key to leader effectiveness in organizations, scholars have not thoroughly investigated the differential prediction of leader performance by political skill dimensions. We grounded our research in a context highly relevant to leadership by assessing leader enterprising demands and performance (i.e., working with and through people). Focusing on two of the four political skill dimensions, we hypothesized and found that interpersonal influence had a linear and networking ability had a curvilinear (i.e., U-shaped) relation with enterprising performance. Moreover, for those experiencing high enterprising demands, a greater degree of interpersonal influence resulted in higher performance. In addition, those experiencing high enterprising demands who also were high on networking ability received the highest performance evaluations, but those who were...