Followership in Leadership Process and Organizational Performance: A Review of Literature

Extant literature on the construct of leadership process has laid a lot of emphasis on the characteristics and behaviors of the individual leader. The attention paid on followership in the process and its role in realizing organizational outcomes is limited. This paper specifically examined through systematic literature review the twin elements of the leadership process: influence and motivation; and how leaders and followers enact them among themselves for enhanced organizational performance. The review involved search of relevant literature in published books and peer reviewed articles in various databases including Google Scholar, JSTOR, Sage, Emerald, ProQuest, EBSCO, and Science Direct. In total, 25 published works and 57 journal articles were reviewed in the study. Scholars have already linked leadership with organizational performance but have overly been biased in the scope of focus on the leadership process dimension. From the review of the extant conceptual, theoretical, and empirical literature, this study raised various issues presenting a case for a new conceptual model to further the existing understanding on leadership process and organizational performance. An integrated conceptual framework linking leadership process and organizational performance considering the critical role of followership and organizational contexts is proposed. The emerging theoretical propositions upon which future research can be conducted for practical purposes are discussed.