Abstract

Although organizations invest in leadership development such as provide formal leadership training, research findings suggest that leaders typically do not find formal training programs to be as useful as learning on the job and social relationships at work. We focused on both formal and informal relationships at work to examine leader development among new leaders who faced a transition into new leadership position. Leader development has been seen as a learning process during which leaders acquire knowledge, skills and abilities to perform as leaders. Furthermore, researchers have identified leader’s self-views as an important proximal indicator of progress in this development process. Specifically, research evidence indicates that leader efficacy (i.e., leader’s confidence in her ability to lead), and leader identity (i.e., the extent to which a leader views himself as a leader) are important outcomes in leader development. We conducted a longitudinal survey research among new leaders and research questions related to the role of new leaders’ network and leader-leader ties as antecedents of leader efficacy and leader identity. We measured network ties by asking new leaders to report their personal network ties at work. We indicated the characteristics of social networks by strength of ties, upper reachability (the number of contacts at higher organizational levels) and network density. In addition, we used leader-leader exchange (LLX) to indicate the quality of new leaders’ relationships with their leaders. The preliminary results indicated that the quality of the working relationship with ones’ leader (LLX) was related to leader efficacy and identity. Furthermore, the results indicated that network density positively related to leader efficacy but the number of weak ties in a network was negatively related to leader efficacy. Finally, the preliminary results showed that the number of a new leader’s contacts at higher organizational levels (upper reachability) was positively associated with leader identity.