How and When Does Visionary Leadership Promote Followers’ Taking Charge? The Roles of Inclusion of Leader in Self and Future Orientation

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between visionary leadership and taking charge. The authors also aim to test the mediating effects of employee inclusion of leader in self and the moderating effects of future orientation.

Methods

This paper tests the theoretical model across a multisource, time-lagged field study with 234 leader-follower dyads as data. SPSS 25.0, PROCESS 3.4 macro and Mplus8.3 were used to test the theoretical hypotheses.

Results

We found that visionary leadership stimulates followers to include leaders in self, which in turn enhances their taking charge. Additionally, the relationship between visionary leadership and follower include of leader in self is strengthened by followers’ future orientation. Furthermore, the mediation effect of follower include leader in self between visionary leadership and followers’ taking charge is established only when followers’ future orientation is high.

Conclusion

Based on self-expansion theory, this study explained how and when the effectiveness of visionary leadership may be optimized from a follower-centric perspective. These results contribute to the visionary leadership and self-expansion literature by introducing inclusion of leader in self as an underlying mechanism and future orientation as a boundary condition.