When The Tail Wags The Dog!

Dr. David Etienne, DBA, CPA, CA

September 25, 2026

Almost every leadership textbook draws the arrow the same way: leadership style influences organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) — the discretionary, go-above-and-beyond stuff employees do that no job description requires. Transformational leaders get more of it. Autocratic leaders get less. The arrow points one direction.

I suggest a counter-argument: what if the arrow also runs the other way? What if sustained OCB from a team can gradually reshape how a leader actually leads — even pulling an autocratic leader toward something closer to democratic, or even glimpses of servant, leadership, regardless of how they started out?

I went looking for whether this holds up. It does — more than I expected — and it changes how you’d think about “fixing” a controlling manager.

The theory already exists for exactly this

Leader-member exchange (LMX) theory, one of the most established frameworks in leadership research, was built explicitly around this idea: the relationship between a leader and each individual subordinate develops through an ongoing exchange, not a fixed style the leader applies uniformly. When a subordinate consistently contributes more than their role requires, the leader typically responds by extending more autonomy, trust, and support back — a more delegative, less controlling pattern, for that person. Do this across enough of a team, for long enough, and you have a plausible mechanism for a leader’s overall pattern shifting.

There’s an even more direct theory: leadership identity is “co-constructed.” A widely cited management theory describes leadership as something that gets claimed by the leader and granted by the people around them, back and forth, over time. A leader can try to act autocratically, but if a team keeps responding with high-effort, trust-signaling behavior instead of resistance or compliance, that response is itself feedback the leader has to metabolize. Style isn’t just asserted from the top. It’s negotiated.

And there’s a whole research tradition — followership theory — built around “reversing the lens”: studying how followers actively shape leaders’ actions, instead of only studying leaders shaping followers. It’s not a fringe idea. It’s been a recognized part of leadership research since a well-known 1988 Harvard Business Review piece argued followers deserved as much research attention as leaders.

Here’s the uncomfortable wrinkle

Some of what looks like “leadership style causing OCB” might not be causal at all — it might be a perception trick. There’s a well-documented bias where people who see good outcomes retroactively perceive the leader as having been more inspiring, more collaborative, more “transformational” than they actually were in the moment. A team performs well and shows strong citizenship behavior, and everyone — including the leader — starts remembering the leadership as having been better than it was. Some of the conventional “leadership style drives OCB” finding may partly be this illusion running in reverse: good outcomes get retroactively attributed to good leadership.

That’s not a reason to dismiss the reverse-causality idea. If anything, it strengthens it — it means part of the story researchers have been telling about leadership driving citizenship behavior may have had the arrow backwards from the start.

What this means practically

If you manage a manager who leans autocratic, the fix might not only be leadership training aimed at them directly. It might be creating conditions where their team’s discretionary effort becomes visible and hard to ignore — because sustained, visible OCB appears to be one of the more reliable levers for shifting how a controlling leader actually behaves, not just how they’re rated on a survey.

And if you’re the leader: the trust and latitude you’re extending to people right now isn’t just a response to who they are. Some of it may be a response to what they’ve already given you — whether you’ve consciously noticed that exchange happening or not.

Have you ever watched a manager’s style visibly loosen up in response to a team that kept showing up for them — even when nothing formal changed?