Rapid Rise Versus Slow Recognition: Motivation to Lead and the Emergence of Informal Leaders in Self‐Managing Teams Over Time

ABSTRACT Research on motivation to lead (MTL) suggests that team members' agentic motives are more relevant than their communal motives in shaping informal leader emergence. Yet, this prevailing consensus in the MTL literature is based on the view of leader emergence as a static one‐time event, discounting its inherently dynamic nature. Integrating dynamic views of leader emergence with the warmth‐competence framework and the passage of time, we propose that both agentic and communal MTL shape leader emergence, albeit at different points of teamwork and through distinct social perceptual pathways. Results from two multiwave studies of MBA students in self‐managing teams ( n = 212 and 355, respectively) show that agentic MTL predicts initial leader emergence via perceptions of competence, which also enable agentic leaders to sustain in leadership positions in the long term. In contrast, communal MTL fosters later leader emergence, as perceptions of warmth and competence increase over time. These findings suggest that teams may appear to initially undervalue communal motives in leadership decisions because agentic individuals establish themselves as leaders before the benefits of communal motives fully materialize.