Not All Claims Are Equal: How Formal Authority Shapes the Dyadic Leader Claiming and Granting Processes

Abstract: Leadership emergence is fundamentally a conflict management problem involving contested influence, disagreement over legitimacy, and negotiation over who gets to lead. Drawing on DeRue and Ashford’s (2010) claiming-granting framework, we examine how formal authority shapes dyadic claiming and granting processes. We address two limitations in prior research: the lack of distinction between formal and informal leader emergence and the treatment of emergence as a compositional, consensus-based construct. Using a SEM-based Social Relations Model, we analyze round-robin data from 94 five-person teams participating in a teamwork simulation. Results reveal significant actor, partner, and relationship-level variance, demonstrating that leadership emergence is compilational and characterized by dyadic disagreement. Claiming predicts receiving leadership grants for both leaders and members, but this relationship is stronger for leaders. Moreover, leaders exhibit greater variance in receiving leadership grants than members, indicating that formal authority amplifies instability in the claiming-granting process rather than producing convergence.

Keywords: leader emergence, dyadic data, leader dynamics, contested leadership