People apply different evaluative frames to a manager as supervisor versus as leader.

Evidence

As Chen and Brewer (2010) argue, people take on different cognitive and psychological frames and standards when they are asked to evaluate their manager as a supervisor (at a relational level) or a leader (at a group/ collective level). In testing such a distinction, they also simultaneously examined whether leadership is fundamentally a collective/group notion (Van Knippenberg & Hogg, 2003; Yukl, 2002), or a relational/ dyadic notion in people’s cognition (Graen & Scandura, 1987; Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995; Schriesheim, Castro, & Cogliser, 1999). — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2316

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does this supervisor/leader framing distinction replicate in organizational settings with actual reporting relationships?