ABSTRACT
A fundamental tenet in the preceding chapters has been that leadership is a social process that is contingent on the perceptions of followers and the meaning they create (also see Hall & Lord, 1995; Hollander & Offerman, 1990; Lord & Maher, 1991; Meindl, 1995). We maintained that a leader can influence various follower attitudes and behaviors by creating affective reactions in followers and by influencing a follower’s working self-concept (WSC)—the dynamic collection of self-representations having cognitive, affective, and behavioral consequences. We also stressed that the WSC is an integrating mechanism linking one’s task context with broad sets of peripheral and core self-schemas that vary with the individual, relational, or collective levels of the self-concept. In this chapter, this framework will be expanded by shifting our focus to a more applied workplace topic—organizational justice. We argue that leaders can influence justice perceptions via their followers’ self-concepts.
