Supervisors: Ingo Kleindienst & Mai Skjøtt Linneberg
Discussants: Anna Holm & John Ulhøi

The presentation will focus on the cover as well as the third paper of the dissertation.

Abstract
Followers and followership behaviors have received scant attention in the academic literature (Oc et al., 2023; Riggio, 2020; Uhl-Bien et al., 2014). This is “one of the most interesting omissions in theory and research on leadership” (Avolio et al., 2009: 434), as this entails that we will never fully understand leadership, because we do not thoroughly comprehend followers and their behaviors. Traditionally, the leadership literature has been highly leader-centric (Bligh, 2011; Oc et al., 2023; Shamir, 1999). Leadership scholars have been preoccupied with understanding leadership and leadership effectiveness by, for instance, focusing on the leader’s traits, the leader’s behaviors, or how different situations are conducive to different leadership behaviors (Day and Antonakis, 2012; Larsson and Alvehus, 2023). As leadership is a triangle of leaders, followers and context (Kellerman, 2019; Oc, 2018; Riggio, 2020), it is problematic that so little attention has been devoted to followers. Indeed, the current status of the leadership literature calls for a more balanced view in which followers play a more prominent role (Oc et al., 2023; Shamir, 2007), because leaders “still take center stage” (Larsson and Alvehus, 2023: 86). Therefore, the overall research question of this PhD dissertation is:

How can followership behaviors be conceptualized and comprehended in different contexts, and how do leaders experience and react to followership behaviors?                      

To answer the research question, I conducted three qualitative interview studies that all revolve around the concept of followership behaviors. To gain an in-depth understanding of the concept, the three studies examine followership behaviors from different perspectives.

Everyone is welcome!