Leaders and Followers in Social Networking Environments: A Conceptual Model

Literature Review

As the main distinction in our conceptualization is between leaders and followers, we define leadership as “influence exerted…over other people to guide, structure and facilitate relationships in a group…” (Yukl, 1998, p. 3). Furthermore, following Yoo and Alavi (2004, p. 29), and in addition to the static approach to leadership offered by Yukl (1998), we treat leadership as “spontaneously accorded by fellow team members and as an emergent phenomenon that develops over time through group processes”. As our understanding of leadership has a strong emphasis on changes over time, we perceive leaders as individuals who earn their status through “incremental influences and contributions to the team” (Hollander, 1960). By implication, the definition of followers is “members of groups who enable and/or support leaders without emerging to a leadership position on their own”. As followers are defined essentially as “non-leaders”, much of the discussion in the following sections focuses on leaders.