How remembering predicts leadership outcomes through the use of a new events binding measure

Abstract

Learning is an important process we go through to accumulate knowledge. People can develop their skills and crystallise their identities around leadership through learning from related experiences. I propose that through a micro-level cognitive processing of binding together features of experienced events, contextual information can be stored in memory in a manner that facilitates skill development, allowing people to build knowledge structures that enhance/crystallise one’s leader identity as well as being a basis for developing context-specific leadership skills. This research extends existing leadership literature by focusing on how people process information to build leadership-specific knowledge structures by drawing on their binding capacity of encoding and retrieving associated information in memory to inform leadership related self-concepts. Four studies were conducted to test the proposed hypotheses. I developed the new event binding measure in Study 1 (N=74), investigated the effect of event binding capacity and leadership experience on leader identity, leadership self-efficacy, and affective-identity motivation to lead in Study 2 (N=128), and the interactive effect of event binding capacity with self- relevant/relational events on the leadership variables (Study 3, N=176; Study 4, N=173). Results suggested that individuals’ event binding capacity positively correlated with fluid intelligence. Individuals with higher event binding capacity and more leadership experience reported higher leader identity. A three-way interaction of event binding capacity, self- relevant events and relational events also predicted higher leader identity and leadership self-efficacy.