Valuable Ally or Emerging Rival? Follower Informal Leadership and Formal Leader Empowerment

Although informal leadership is widely recognized as influential in teams, existing research has primarily focused on self-managed contexts where formal authority is absent. Yet informal leadership also emerges in teams with formal leaders, and how these leaders cognitively interpret and behaviorally respond to the emergence of followers’ informal leadership remains unclear. We theorize that followers’ informal leadership constitutes an inherently ambiguous signal, simultaneously conveying trustworthiness and potential status threat, thereby shaping formal leaders’ empowerment decisions. Furthermore, drawing on system justification theory, we propose that formal leaders’ status-striving motivation functions as a critical cognitive lens shaping their interpretations. Study 1, using longitudinal data from English Premier League (EPL) teams, shows that formal leaders perceive followers’ informal leadership both as trustworthy and potentially threatening. Study 2, a field survey of 89 teams, tests the full model and demonstrates the moderating role of leader status-striving motivation. Study 3 employs an online experiment with 357 managers to replicate these findings and establish causal relationships. Collectively, this research offers new insights into leadership dynamics and advances understanding of how formal and informal leadership structures interact within teams.