Social Contagion of Opportunism and Leadership Intervention

This paper addresses three basic questions about leadership: Does organizational crisis increase people’s opportunism? Does leadership intervention reduce people’s opportunism? What kind of leadership would be effective to cope with organizational crisis? An empirical study using experimental scenarios and questionnaires found that people show increased opportunism in organizational crisis; leadership intervention reduces opportunism; visionary and self-sacrificial leader behavior respectively is more effective than managerial leader behavior in crisis as measured by legitimacy. This paper introduces the notion of “social contagion of opportunism”, rapid dispersion of opportunistic attitudes among organizational members in a crisis due to the anticipated opportunism of coworkers. This notion is then empirically tested within the social information processing perspective. By doing so, it is attempted to show that people react not to objective but to subjective reality.