Increasing Metacognitive Capacity by Disrupting Implicit Leader Prototypes

The study of leadership has grown and changed a great deal in the last several decades. Gone are the days of trying to identify the next “great man,” replaced by contemporary leadership development models that emphasize concepts such as collaboration, democratic and participatory decision-making, an ethical/moral code, authenticity, contextual dynamism, and a shared vision, among others (for overviews and critiques of these models and associated theories, see Dugan, 2017; Johnson, 2017). This shift in focus is reasonable when viewing leadership as a learned process and perhaps represents a laudatory aim of inclusivity for the leader–follower dynamic. However, there are hidden concerns that must be addressed when helping students learn how to bring these development models into practice while critically engaging them in real-world contexts. One of the key reasons for concern is implicit bias and the role that implicit prototypes play in leadership.

Despite the move away from purely trait-based understandings of leaders and leadership, embedded in the leadership development process are assumptions about who a leader is and what a leader looks like. These assumptions are built on individuals’ lived experiences, the people they interact with, their socialization in institutions, and the media they have consumed over the course of their lives. To make matters more complex, it is likely that students are unaware of their assumptions and how, if left unexamined, these assumptions impact how they understand leadership, who they see as a leader, and how they might contribute to leadership processes.

To this end, we argue that understanding metacognition (i.e., thinking and learning about how one thinks and learns) and building metacognitive capacity are fundamental to critical leadership development. Building metacognitive capacity augments critical learners’ abilities to interrogate taken-for-granted assumptions about leaders and leadership. This chapter situates the exploration of implicit bias and implicit leader prototypes as powerful vehicles for building metacognitive capacity as well as disrupting normative assumptions about leaders and leadership. The chapter provides practical insights into how best to infuse this approach into leadership curricula and cocurricula.

Metacognition and Increasing Metacognitive Capacity

Metacognition is broadly defined as “one's knowledge concerning one's own cognitive processes or anything related to them, e.g., the learning-relevant properties of information or data” (Flavell, 1976, p. 232). Made even more straightforward: metacognition is thinking and learning about how one thinks and learns. Flavell's (1976) pioneering work breaks metacognitive knowledge down into three types: strategy, task, and person. Strategy is knowledge of approaches for learning, thinking, and problem solving that are applicable across all or most domains (Pintrich, 2002). Task involves developing an understanding that endeavors may be different under different conditions and due to this may require different strategies to complete (Pintrich, 2002). Paris, Lipson, and Wixson (1983) pointed out, learners must develop knowledge about the “when” and “why” of using certain cognitive strategies. Finally, person encompasses “everything that you could come to believe about the nature of yourself and other people as cognitive processors” (Flavell, 1979, p. 907). New perspectives are built when old assumptions, and the means by which those assumptions were formed, are examined in light of new experiences and new knowledge (Flavell, 2004).

Some learners will develop metacognitive knowledge on their own (Flavell, 2004), but it can and should be an explicit part of the developmental process in any learning environment. Extensive research shows that engaging in metacognitive learning experiences produces better learning strategies and knowledge construction (Flavell, 2004). Further, Schraw, Crippen, and Hartley (2006) suggested that teaching for metacognitive development improves learning more than exclusively focusing on content knowledge because students get practice learning how to learn. To most effectively accomplish this and to best build metacognitive capacity, it should then be an explicit component of instruction (Pintrich, 2002; Tanner, 2012). This is particularly true in the context of educating for leadership development.

Although all types of metacognitive knowledge (i.e., strategy, task, person) are important to developing learners, Flavell (1979) pointed out that most metacognitive efforts concern engaging multiple knowledge types. The focus in leadership development, generally, and around implicit bias and implicit leader prototypes, specifically, concerns building metacognitive capacity around knowledge of self. The next section outlines the importance of understanding implicit bias and implicit leader prototypes in critical leadership development as well as illustrates the importance of metacognitive capacity in this process.

Implicit Bias and Implicit Leader Prototypes

The fields of biology and psychology acknowledge that some human processes are carried out by the brain and body without conscious awareness or knowledge (e.g., breathing). These unconscious processes extend to how and what we think (i.e., cognition), and they are particularly influential in shaping attitudes—the positive and negative evaluations people make about objects, events, ideas, and people (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). The first several decades of attitudinal research either expressly focused on the conscious mind's role in evaluation or made no distinction between the conscious and unconscious mind (Allport, 1935; Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). Later research demonstrated that behavioral actions match attitudes if the actor is aware or conscious of their attitudes at the time of actions (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993). These studies paved the way for pioneering research on implicit attitudes by Greenwald and Banaji (1995).

Greenwald and Banaji (1995) realized that if action connected strongly with attitude when the actor was aware of the attitude at the time of the action, then the inverse must also be true. This realization led to the study of implicit attitudes, which are defined as “introspectively unidentified (or inaccurately identified) traces of past experience that mediate favorable or unfavorable feeling, thought, or action toward social objects” (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995, p. 8). There are many different measurement tools used to examine implicit attitudes, but the most commonly used is the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, Poehlman, Uhlmann, & Banaji, 2005). The IAT measures the strength of associations between concepts by asking participants to respond as quickly as possible when categorical terms (e.g., “black” and “white”) are combined with evaluative terms (e.g., “good” and “bad”). Implicit associations are demonstrated based on the speed differentiation between these associating categories and evaluations.

Implicit bias has been studied across a wide swath of disciplines and for many different purposes. The main thrust of this research, however, and the area that has the most concern for leadership development, involves attitudes and biases related to social categorizations, including, but not limited to, race, gender, sexual orientation, and age (Banaji & Greenwald, 2013). To offer just a few examples of this phenomenon, studies have shown that a strong majority of White respondents have an implicit association of “white” with “good” and “black” with “bad,” that male respondents overwhelmingly associate career with men and family with women, and that young respondents have strong positive associations with young and negative associations with old. It is interesting to note that these are not simple in-group preferences as respondents of all ages actually tended to have a more positive association with youth over age, and only about 50% of Black respondents associate “black” with good (Banaji & Greenwald, 2013). These results speak to the power of external influences on our associations.

Implicit associations, while perhaps disconcerting, would not be nearly as problematic if they did not impact behavior. However, hundreds of research studies conducted since the 1990s demonstrate a positive relationship between implicit attitudes and behavior as well as that implicit preference or favorability predicts behavior (see Banaji & Greenwald, 2013; Valian, 1998). This includes micro-behaviors or micro-inequities, which are the small interactions, the things we say and do often without awareness, that communicate to those around us what we are feeling or thinking and are often a clue to unconscious bias (Brennan, 2013). Therefore, it is important to examine particular leadership constructs closely associated with implicit bias, implicit leadership theories (ILTs), and implicit leader prototypes.

Spanning over 30 years, research on ILTs are based on the premise that through the socialization process individuals create and rely on cognitive schemas of the world to cope with information complexity (Dugan, 2017; Epitropaki, Sy, Martin, Tram-Quon, & Topakas, 2013). Prototypes are a commonly used form of schemas developed to summarize the most salient characteristics or traits of members in a particular category and specific context, such as a military leader, doctor, or teacher (Alabdulhadi, Schyns, & Staudigl, 2017; Dugan, 2017). When an individual's traits or behaviors closely match our leader prototype, our schemas are activated and we assume the person to be leader-like, while negative implications can emerge if the person is not perceived as prototypical (Alabdulhadi et al., 2017; Dugan, 2017; Epitropaki et al., 2013).

A central idea of ILTs is that leadership is socially constructed and that people understand leadership based on the internal representations they hold (Alabdulhadi et al., 2017). ILTs, and thus one's leader prototype, reflect personal interpretations of traits and behaviors rather than objective reality (Alabdulhadi et al., 2017). Unlike explicit theories of leadership, which are based on data and scientific observation, ILTs are learned without intent or conscious attention. They are often applied automatically, allowing one to make fast judgments regarding leaders and leadership (Epitropaki et al., 2013; Goethals, Sorenson, & Burns, 2004). Implicit processing within the leadership domain limits and minimizes the individual's awareness of the impact the activated schema has on their actions and the influence it can have on how they view, evaluate, and respond to leaders (Epitropaki et al., 2013).

An individual-leader prototype match or mismatch can lead to significant implications for the success of individuals in leader roles. For example, when leader prototypes are congruent with how leaders present themselves, there are higher evaluations of their performance, whether effective or not (Junker & van Dick, 2014). When leader prototypes match, the leader is perceived to be more legitimate and there is more respect, collegiality, and trust for the person (Junker & van Dick, 2014). The inverse is true of those who are perceived to lack the traits and characteristics closely aligned with the leader prototype (Dugan, 2017).

Eagly and Chin (2010) wrote that stereotypes had a “tendency to operate below conscious awareness” thus “fully qualified individuals from ‘outsider’ groups often appear to lack the ‘right stuff’ for leadership” and “have reduced access to leadership roles” (p. 218). Similarly, as a product of socialization, leader prototypes can be problematic because they reflect social stratification in a hegemonic, U.S. society that prefers White, cisgender, male, and young people in leader roles while minoritized individuals are regarded as non-leaders in many aspects (Dugan, 2017; Eagly & Chin, 2010; Hanold, 2013). Studies have revealed how strongly leader prototypes are related to race, sex, gender, and age, and how they lead to a wide range of negative outcomes in one's success in a leader role (Dugan, 2017).

If implicit leadership and prototyping largely operate because of unconscious thinking or a disconnect between thinking and behaviors, then metacognition serves as a powerful developmental tool to address this. Its cultivation also becomes an essential element in the critical leadership development process. The next section explores instructional tools and methods for increasing metacognitive capacity in critical leadership development and outlines lessons that link building these capacities to implicit bias and implicit leader prototypes.

Exercises for Building Metacognitive Capacity

The task of building metacognitive capacity is a difficult one. It is made even more challenging when centered around constructs like implicit leader prototypes and implicit bias, which we cannot easily or directly examine. However, if both educators and students are willing to put in the effort collaboratively, implicit beliefs can be understood and metacognitive capacity can be expanded. To accomplish this, a critical pedagogical approach that interrogates and upends societal inequities is paramount (Kincheloe, 2008). This approach can be carried out in a leadership context through critical self-reflection and an explicit focus on metacognitive learning, while deconstructing and reconstructing systems and our own beliefs about them and roles within them.

Engaging in the Work of Building Metacognition

The exercises described above can be introduced in curricular and cocurricular settings as well as with youth of varying ages. They help to frame the environment as one that values critical reflection, encourages the exchange of knowledge and opinions, and aims to disrupt hegemony. As noted in Chapter 2, if presented early, students may be primed to interrogate ILTs and leader prototypes when real life leadership situations arise within classes, programs, or organizational experiences (Hoyt & Burnette, 2013; Junker & van Dick, 2014). Hoyt and Burnette (2013) suggested that, similar to other schema, ILTs can be primed and manipulated and that “past interventions have demonstrated the potential malleability of these beliefs and have proven effective in promoting goal achievement” (p. 24). In other words, being intentional about confronting implicit beliefs can lead to behavior that benefits the goals of the group. Although this pedagogical practice of metacognition, as it relates to leader prototypes, can be applied to most student leadership development scenarios (e.g., leadership activities, community service, class participation, group work, meeting dynamics), a unique and useful application is in the context of peer-to-peer assessment (e.g., selection processes, performance evaluations, awards selections).

It is common practice in leadership development programs to have student raters observe applicants working through a leadership activity with other participants. Student raters then assess “leader-like” behaviors among participants in the group, which are later factored into decision-making processes about applicants. Researchers reveal that implicit leader prototypes can play a significant role in who we identify as a leader or perceive as exhibiting leader-like behaviors (Junker & van Dick, 2014). Conducting exercises that name implicit leader prototypes and bring to light the potential limitations created by them may help create a sensitivity to these biases during the evaluation process. They may also foster a space to more directly confront biases as they arise in group decision-making processes (Junker & van Dick, 2014). Similarly, in peer-interview processes, a micro-inequity or comment such as “they just don't seem to be a good fit,” could elicit dialogue around “fit” as a marker of implicit leader prototypes at play. In both of these contexts, students witness the impact in real time and are afforded the opportunity to engage in metacognitive processes to reconstruct the situation.

We all have implicit biases that may impact the implicit leader prototypes we create, and ultimately our actions in leadership contexts. Increasing metacognitive abilities is essential for critical leadership development. The exploration of implicit bias and implicit leader prototypes through the critical pedagogical approach of deconstructing and reconstructing knowledge is a means to stimulate metacognitive capacity while also pushing leadership development toward more democratic, equitable, and just goals.