Bo Wang

The core proposition of contingency theories of effective leadership is that different situations require different leadership behaviors. However, existing theories are limited by their heavy reliance on meta-categories to classify concrete leadership behaviors. These frameworks may overlook important behaviors that fall between meta-categories and often fail to clarify their relations. Moreover, the operationalizations of existing contingency theories—many of which were developed decades ago—no longer meet contemporary standards for leadership measurement. To address these limitations, we introduce the Situated Appraisal of Leadership Tool (SALT; http://leadwithsalt.nl), which is based on a circumplex approach to leadership. SALT consists of eight systematically varied descriptions of hypothetical leaders, each reflecting one of eight “octant styles” within a circumplex structure. These descriptions can be evaluated using different criteria, such as perceived leadership effectiveness. The SALT circumplex space is defined by two interpersonal dimensions: interpersonal agency on the vertical axis and interpersonal communion on the horizontal axis. Thus, the eight SALT leadership styles systematically differ from one another in terms of interpersonal agency and communion. The development and validation of SALT adhered to best practices for scale construction and validation—both in general (e.g., evaluating content validity) and in leadership research specifically (e.g., ensuring behavioral counterfactuals). Following multiple rounds of revision and validation (total N = 1699), the final version of SALT was tested in three studies (total N = 1468), which will be the primary focus of this presentation.