Choosing to Lead: Research on Leadership Without Formal Authority

Team meetings sometimes stall when no one has formal responsibility to lead. Discussion circles without resolution until someone names the impasse and proposes a way forward, for example by suggesting that competing approaches be made visible and compared. In such moments, one person clarifies what needs to happen next, another coordinates the moving parts, and someone else speaks up when confusion sets in. These are not necessarily managers. They are people who choose to step in.

Working across functions without formal authority has prompted me to review research on how leadership emerges and what enables it.

So what counts as leadership when it is not tied to a role?

What Leadership Means

Northouse [1] defines leadership as “a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal”. This definition synthesises core components from multiple leadership frameworks. A similar wording has been popularised in practitioner literature, for example by Kevin Kruse, who describes leadership as “a process of social influence, which maximizes the efforts of others, towards the achievement of a goal” [2].

This definition shifts leadership from something tied to who someone is or the role they hold to what they do in relation to others. If you influence others towards shared objectives, you are leading, whether or not you have a title. The behaviours that create this influence are observable and learnable. They are also accessible to anyone in a team.

How Leadership Emerges

Research on leadership emergence repeatedly points to three elements: motivation, behaviour, and context.

Together, they provide a useful way to organise the evidence reviewed here.

Motivation: Why People Step In

Chan and Drasgow [3] surveyed over 2,000 participants across military and university contexts and identified three key drivers:

• Affective-identity: Intrinsic enjoyment of leading
• Social-normative: A sense of duty when direction is missing
• Non-calculative: A willingness to lead without regard to personal costs or benefits

Of the three motivations to lead, affective-identity and social-normative were associated with intentions to pursue leadership roles, while non-calculative motivation was not. Kennedy et al. [4] found this pattern in a study of 750 university students.

These differences remind us that not seeking leadership roles is not the same as being unwilling to lead.

Behaviour: How Leadership Shows Up

Behaviours make leadership visible. Unlike traits, which are relatively stable characteristics like extraversion or conscientiousness, behaviours are the specific actions we take that others can observe and respond to.

Drawing on evidence from 13 existing meta-analyses and 46 primary studies, DeRue et al. [5] concluded that leader behaviours were more important for leadership effectiveness than leader traits.

In a field experiment with 128 forest users in Bolivia and Uganda, Andersson, Chang and Molina-Garzón [6] examined how groups reached agreement on rules for managing shared resources. The study focused on voluntary leadership, defined as unprompted actions by participants who took the initiative to speak up and propose a course of action, without formal authority. Groups in which such voluntary leadership occurred were more likely to reach agreement on new rules than groups in which no participant took on this role.

In a study of 597 employees, Van Dyne and LePine [7] examined voice behaviour, defined as speaking up with constructive suggestions or concerns. Employees who engaged more in voice were later rated more highly on performance by their supervisors.

Research on shared leadership shows that leadership does not need to sit with a single designated leader. In a study of 59 consulting teams, Carson, Tesluk and Marrone [8] found that when leadership was shared across team members, teams were rated more highly by clients. They describe shared leadership as arising when team members help set direction, support one another, and speak up.

Across the studies reviewed in this section, leadership is expressed through observable actions, such as taking initiative or speaking up, rather than through formal roles.

Context: When Leadership Flourishes

Environment matters because even the best intentions falter when the context discourages action. Whether leadership behaviours are expressed and sustained depends on how interpersonal risk is perceived and how contributions are interpreted within a group. Context therefore influences not only willingness to step in, but whether actions are recognised as legitimate leadership.

Psychological Safety and Work Design

One well-established contextual condition for informal leadership is psychological safety. Edmondson [9] studied 51 manufacturing teams and found that team psychological safety was strongly associated with learning behaviour, which in turn predicted team performance. Teams that felt safe were more likely to ask questions, admit errors, and offer suggestions.

Subsequent research demonstrates that this pattern generalises across settings. Frazier et al. [10] synthesised 117 studies involving more than 22,000 individuals and reported strong relationships between psychological safety, learning behaviour, and information sharing. They also found that work design and leadership practices were more influential in shaping psychological safety than individual characteristics, reinforcing its contextual nature.

Leader behaviour plays a central role in shaping perceived safety. Detert and Burris [11] examined over 3,000 employees and found that managerial openness increased improvement-oriented voice by reducing perceived interpersonal risk. Employees were more willing to speak up when they believed their input would be welcomed rather than penalised.

These findings show how team conditions can support informal leadership behaviours. At the same time, they do not imply that such conditions are experienced uniformly by all members.

Structural Inequality and Status

Leadership emergence is influenced by social status differences that affect who feels able to engage in leadership-related behaviours. More broadly, leadership research emphasises that leadership arises through social interaction and, in some cases, through recognition by others.

Importantly, status influences how psychological safety is experienced and how safe team members feel speaking up. Nembhard and Edmondson [12] show that professional status is associated with psychological safety, and that leader inclusiveness weakens but does not eliminate status-based differences.

Recognition plays a central role in whether informal leadership is sustained. Research on leadership emergence shows that leadership is reinforced through recognition by others, and is less likely to persist when such recognition is absent [13]. Even when individuals are willing to take initiative, leadership may stall if those behaviours are not recognised as leadership by others.

Taken together, this research indicates that leadership emergence depends on how individual behaviours are interpreted in their social context. Synthesising findings from 270 studies, Badura, Galvin and Lee [14] describe leadership emergence as a dynamic process that unfolds over time, involving individual behaviours, perceptions held by others, and responses to those behaviours, through which these behaviours may or may not be recognised as leadership.

Understanding leadership emergence as an ongoing and socially contingent process suggests that there are multiple points at which leadership may be enabled or constrained.

Actions Worth Trying

The research reviewed so far points to two related but distinct choices. In moments like the stalled meeting described earlier, these choices become concrete: one is whether you step in yourself when direction is missing. The other is whether you act in ways that make it easier for leadership to emerge from others. Their outcomes depend on context, including the psychological safety and status dynamics discussed in the previous section.

When you choose to step in

• Speak up to raise concerns, ask questions, or propose a way forward
  Informal leadership often begins when someone takes the initiative to voice an issue or suggest a possible course of action rather than letting uncertainty persist. Research on voice and voluntary leadership shows that such initiative can influence group outcomes even in the absence of formal authority.

When you want to make it easier for leadership to emerge

• Invite contribution and avoid monopolising influence
  Leadership is more likely to be shared when influence is not concentrated in a single individual. Making space for others to contribute supports leadership emerging through interaction rather than position.

• Offer support and recognise effort
  Informal leadership is sustained through social reinforcement. Supporting others and acknowledging their contributions affects whether initiative is repeated or withdrawn, and whether leadership claims are taken seriously by the group.

• Show openness by seeking feedback or alternative views
  Openness reduces perceived interpersonal risk. When people signal that challenge and feedback are welcome, others are more likely to speak up with ideas or concerns.

These actions do not require a formal role. They reflect different ways individuals can either step forward themselves or make it easier for leadership to emerge from others.

Conclusion

The evidence reviewed suggests that informal leadership is more likely to emerge when motivation, behaviour, and context align, and that this has positive implications for how teams function.

Leadership is not about waiting for authority, but about responding when direction is missing. Informal leadership arises when individuals help groups make progress, even without a formal mandate.

At the same time, the research highlights a clear limit. Not everyone can step in with the same safety or likelihood of being heard. Whether such actions develop into recognised leadership depends on how others respond. The challenge is therefore not only to act, but to ensure that such contributions are taken seriously regardless of who offers them.

References

1. P. Northouse, Leadership: Theory and Practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2019.
2. K. Kruse, What Is Leadership?, Apr. 3, 2013. [Online]. Available: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2013/04/09/what-is-leadership/
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4. J. Kennedy, K. Chan, M. Ho, M. Uy, and O. Chernyshenko, Motivation to Lead as Mediator of Relations Between the Dark Triad, Big Five, and Leadership Intention, Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12, 2021. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.675347
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