Followers’ use of vision guidance and intellectual competency to impact the visionary leadership perception and integration: Evidence from UK retail sector

Abstract

Background: Leadership vision is used by followers as a strategic tool to secure a successful business future for the organization. For vision integration between followers and leaders, the formation of perception is inevitable. Commercial organizations today adheres to the formality of coming up with the vision statements and promoting them within the companies but fail to address the problem of how the visionary leadership is been perceived and integrated by the followers to bring transformation due to vision. Objectives: The objective of this study, therefore, was to explore the experiences of UK-based followers in retail organizations. The research questions were as follows: (1) How do followers of visionary leadership by using vision guidance and intellectual ability integrate into a vision that facilitates the formation of shared vision and followers’ perception? (2) how these mutually inclusive interconnections develop and cause a whole readiness in the followers to prepare for the organizational change? Method: An inductive qualitative design was used for this study. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 followers who had experienced follower-leader relationships in communicating vision. The collected data were then analysed using thematic analysis. Findings: The themes developed from research questions revealed several ways in which followers use vision guidance and intellectual ability to integrate into vision. The shared vision and followers’ perception of visionary leadership that are interlinked with each other offer a comprehensive picture for this type of transformational leadership. The main findings that emerged from the data analysis are about how followers share the vision. Teamwork and bonding with the leaders and the common cause by following the big picture of the retail business trigger shared vision. Through leadership vision, the followers are also impacted by the business objectives of the customer satisfaction/customer service and experience which is the key part of the retail vision. This visionary behaviour inspires the followers and hence creates an ideal self for the leaders that also motivate them to integrate vision into their daily work. This integration is possible when followers have small contributions to work behaviours and the leaders empower broad-based actions in followers. The vision integration depends on the intellectual ability of followers, and it is found that the higher the intellectual ability, the better is the vision understanding. When follower integrates into vision, they experience future guidance which also develops and progress them for future leadership roles and guide them in their work. Each of these themes discussed above encompassed a total of 20 sub-themes on average. Conclusions: This research has provided a unique insight into the impacts of vision guidance and intellectual competency of followers on sharing of the vision and its perception in the context of the UK-based large retailers. The findings suggest that the followers experience several positive impacts of visionary leadership on their personalities in terms of changes in perception about leaders and adoption of follower role in reaction to the vision shared. Some negative outlier findings also suggest that followers resist the vision and its content from the leaders. These impacts are not limited to personal attributes but also cover the business vision which includes customer satisfaction and supply chain. Such far-reaching impacts of visionary leadership have not been sufficiently explored previously. Contrary to the negative tendencies expressed in the literature of followership, some of the findings indicate positive aspects, such as advanced working and proactive followers. The findings of this study provide a rare insight into the shared vision and follower perception strategies specific to retail business.