Abstract

The managerial application of Pygmalion effect in work organizations were investigated. Most prior studies investigated the relationship between a supervisor's expectation of a subordinate and the resulting performance or job-related attitude measures after manipulating the supervisor's expectation through false feedback on a subordinate's potential. However, there are many supervisory expectations naturally cxcurred through their subordinates' entry-level and past records, which are believed to be stronger than the induced expectation. Expectation is an internal belief, and a supervisor's expectation-communication behaviors(called Pygmalion leadership behaviors: PLBs for this study) has a more significant and direct effect on a subordinate than expectation itself. In this study, supervisor's PLBs to high-expectancy subordinates were collected and measured from 165 employees working with large companies in Korea. As the result of a factor-analysis on PLBs, we got four factors such as ① inspiring confidence, ② warm treatment, ③ private interaction, and ④ entrusting. The relationship between a supervisor's PLBs of his subordinates and the resulting performance and job-related attitude measures of the subordinates was also investigated. The results revealed that the effort-related factors such as inspiring confidence and entrusting had more important influences on subordinates' performance and other job-related attitude measures than the affect-related factors such as warm treatment and private interaction. From this study, we can have a useful implication on developing leadership training program. If a supervisor wants to be a Pygmalion, he must pay attention to inspiring his subordinates' confidence and assigning more challenging work to them.