REVIEW article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Organizational Psychology
The Associations Between Leadership Styles and Perceived Insider Status: A Meta-Analysis
Provisionally accepted
- Southwest University, Chongqing, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
The perceived insider status of employees is crucial for the development of both organizations and individuals. This paper provides the first meta-analytic examination of the relationships between leadership styles and followers' perceived insider status. The meta-analysis examined 12 leadership styles across 137 articles, comprising a total of 151 effect sizes (N=45,228). The results revealed significant positive correlations between leader-member exchange, differential leadership, inclusive leadership, participative leadership, transformational leadership, empowering leadership, authentic leadership, servant leadership, humble leadership, benevolent leadership, moral leadership, and perceived insider status. Conversely, authoritarian leadership showed a significant negative correlation with perceived insider status. Additionally, the results of relative weight analysis indicated that inclusive leadership exhibited the strongest explanatory power for perceived insider status, while transformational leadership showed the weakest explanatory power. Furthermore, moderation analysis revealed that there were no significant moderation effects of study design, leadership measurement tools, publication status, gender, or age on the relationship between leadership and perceived insider status.
Keywords: perceived insider status, Leadership styles, inclusive leadership, Meta-analysis, Relative weight analysis
Received: 19 May 2025; Accepted: 29 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Lin, Yang and Shen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Yingkai Yang, yangyk0725@swu.edu.cn
Yimo Shen, shenym1980@126.com
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.