Nowadays, the high demand on companies for innovation and adaptability has meant that employees are increasingly being asked to take the initiative more often and demonstrate leadership qualities, even if being a leader was not part of the original job description. However, while this phenomenon has led scholars to look at the aspects that lead people not in formal leadership positions to act like leaders, existing research has somewhat overlooked the influence of situational factors (events).

This incomplete understanding of when and why individuals practice informal leadership encouraged Schaubroeck, Peng, Hannah, Ma, and Cianci to develop a model to test their hypothesis that failed progress towards a desired occupational benchmark results in psychological responses that limit individuals’ capabilities to engage in informal leadership behaviours. The authors use two perspectives to build their moderated mediation model, which links occupational progress failure and trait neuroticism to informal leadership behaviour, namely the goal progress theory of rumination and the resource allocation model.

Goal progress theory of rumination says that when individuals fail in areas that are important to their personal identities, they tend to ruminate about the failure and its implications until they either reverse the failure or it becomes terminal. Rumination is a type of emotion-focused thinking where considerable attention is paid to setbacks or regrets and cognitive resources are withheld from more productive pursuits. Based on this, the authors argue that individuals who are more neurotic will show stronger effects of occupational progress failure on self-focused rumination, as well as psychosomatic symptoms that stem from prolonged rumination.

The resource allocation model states that the performance and learning of novel or complex tasks are compromised by the more limited attentional resources available when there are other tasks or thoughts that take up an individual’s attention. Following this, the authors posit that persistent rumination brought about by occupational progress failures may thus reduce informal leadership behaviours by limiting surplus attentional resources.

Schaubroeck, Peng, Hannah, Ma, and Cianci tested their model in two separate studies. In the first study, an experiment was run that manipulated poor vs. good performance (failure vs. non-failure) in a simulated Certified Public Accountant exam of advanced accounting students. After taking the simulated exam, the accounting students completed a subsequent leaderless group discussion task. It was found that manipulated poor performance promoted the students’ ruminative thoughts about the test, and such thoughts were negatively related to peer ratings of informal leadership behaviour during the subsequent leaderless group discussion task.

The second study assessed the relationship between occupational progress failure and informal leadership among military trainees on a 14-week training programme. The results showed that failure to pass a required fitness test early in the group’s formation elevated trainees’ psychosomatic symptoms, an indirect measure of sustained rumination, thereby hindering subsequent informal leadership behaviour. The authors also examined how neuroticism moderates the indirect effect of failure on informal leadership behaviour and found that neuroticism exacerbated the positive effect of failure on rumination and psychosomatic symptoms in the first and second studies, respectively.

Ultimately, by modelling how occupational progress failure events interact with neuroticism, the research shows how such events impact individuals’ engagement in leadership behaviour. The authors also reveal how intrapsychic states compromise people’s likelihood of engaging in informal leadership behaviour. Specifically, they find that occupational progress failure limits people’s attempts to claim informal leadership, and that this occurs through the intrapsychic process of ruminative cognition and the psychosomatic symptoms caused by prolonged rumination.