ABSTRACT
Understanding how individuals are labeled as leaders is only a first step in understanding how we process information about other people in work situations. In this chapter we take a brief but more detailed look at social information processing. This topic is interesting for three reasons. First, being limited information processors, we take many shortcuts in forming expectations about other people’s traits and behaviors. We rely on only part of the information to which we are exposed when we form assessments of others. Nevertheless, these expectations provide a cognitive context that affects future actions with individuals. Second, as we noted in our discussion of limited-capacity information processing models, many biases in information processing can be traced to perceivers’ use of cognitive simplifications. For example, gender-based biases in social perceptions may be related to using gender as a salient category for encoding and retrieving social information, rather than to using alternative categories, such as “potential leaders.” Third, as noted in the last chapter, the primary methodology used to study leadership (and many other types of social perceptions, such as performance evaluations) is questionnaire-based descriptions of behavior, provided by organizational members. Understanding how we process information related to questionnaires may help us see the limitations of this methodology as well as indicate ways such limitations can be overcome. As we take a more microscopic view of social information processing, we will comment on each of these three areas, but our emphasis will be on assessing traits and measuring behavior. The impact of expectations on superior-subordinate exchanges and gender-related biases will be addressed in subsequent chapters.
