Leadership Out of Necessity: Work Empowerment, Leader Identity, and Financial Strain as Predictors of Leadership Aspirations During Covid-19

We examine organizational- (work empowerment) and individual-level (leader identity) factors that may affect leadership aspirations and how these factors interact with financial strain. A natural intervention in which time 1 data were collected prior to the COVID-19 pandemic allowed us to hypothesize a longitudinal moderated mediation model using pre- and during-pandemic data. Our hypothesized model specified that pre-pandemic work empowerment would indirectly predict during-pandemic leadership aspirations via during-pandemic leader identity, with during-pandemic financial strain moderating the indirect relationship. Our study with a sample of 236 Canadian full-time employees in large organizations who did not hold a leadership position found support for the moderated mediation model. Employees with both high leader identity and high financial strain had the highest levels of leadership aspirations, which suggests that these individuals may aspire to leadership partly out of necessity and/or desire for more job security, higher salary, or other perks that come with such roles.