Leadership Research Summary:
• It is widely recognized that leadership behaviors drive leaders’ success. But despite the importance of assessing leadership behavior for selection and development, current measurement practices are limited.
• This study contributes to the literature by examining the structured interview method as a potential approach to assess leadership behavior. To this end, we developed a structured interview measuring constructs from Yukl’s (2012) leadership taxonomy.
• Supervisors in diverse positions participated in the interview as part of a leadership assessment program. Confirmatory factor analyses supported the assumption that leadership constructs could be assessed as distinct interview dimensions.
• Results further showed that interview ratings predicted a variety of leadership outcomes (supervisors’ annual income, ratings of situational leader effectiveness, subordinates’ well-being and affective organizational commitment) beyond other relevant predictors.
• Findings offer implications on how to identify leaders who have a positive impact on their subordinates, and they inform us about conceptual differences between leadership measures
Leadership Research Implications and Findings:
• Overall, this study provides encouraging evidence for the use of structured interview method in the field of leader selection and development. Regarding leader selection, the finding that interview ratings demonstrate incremental validity beyond leader traits, self-ratings and subordinate ratings of leadership behaviors suggests that the costs of conducting an interview (e.g., training interviewers, time required for administering interviews as compared to administering questionnaires) may be outweighed by its benefits to validity.
• Regarding implications for leader development, the most important finding is that interview ratings are not redundant to but may meaningfully complement other leadership measures.
• In a developmental program, it is often required to provide supervisors with differentiated feedback on their behaviors. In this context, interview ratings of leadership behaviors could offer an additional perspective to self-ratings and ratings from other sources (i.e., ratings from subordinates, peers, and superiors as part of a 360° feedback intervention).
• Evidence from this study illustrates that structured interviews help to identify leaders who have a positive impact on their subordinates. In addition, interview ratings of leadership behavior constructs predicted criteria beyond a number of other relevant predictors including self-ratings and subordinate ratings of the same leadership constructs. Thus, the interview method shows potential to meaningfully complement existing leadership measures in research and practice.