Respectful Inquiry: A Motivational Account of Leading Through Asking Questions and Listening

Practitioners repeatedly note that the everyday behavior of asking followers open questions and attentively listening to their responses is a powerful leadership technique. Yet, despite such popularity, these practices are currently undertheorized. Addressing this gap, we formally define the behavioral configuration of asking open questions combined with attentive listening as “respectful inquiry,” and we draw on self-determination theory to provide a motivational account of its antecedents, consequences, and moderators within a leader-follower relationship. Specifically, we argue that respectful inquiry principally satisfies followers’ basic psychological needs for competence, relatedness, and autonomy. Against this background, we highlight “paradoxical” contexts where respectful inquiry is likely to be especially rare but would also be especially valuable. These paradoxical contexts include situations where interpersonal power difference, time pressure, physical distance, cognitive load, follower dissatisfaction, or organizational control focus is high. We additionally outline how the effect of respectful inquiry behaviors critically hinges on the interaction history a follower has with a leader. More generally, we suggest that the leadership field would benefit from complementing its traditional focus on “gestalt” leadership styles with research on concrete and narrow communicative behaviors, such as respectful inquiry.