Abstract

In today’s complex and rapidly changing social environment, leadership has become a core driver of organizational competitive advantage. Followership-centered research further demonstrates that follower characteristics play a critical role in shaping organizational performance and employee effectiveness. As an important branch of implicit followership theory, leaders’ perceptions of followership anti-prototypes have been shown to exert consistently negative effects in both business and higher education contexts. However, influenced by positive psychology and prototype theory, empirical research on leaders’ followership anti-prototypes remains relatively limited. Prior studies suggest that distinct sociocultural backgrounds and organizational settings may give rise to different anti-prototype configurations. Building on this premise, the present study integrates existing measurement approaches with the unique cultural context of Chinese higher education institutions and initially proposes a three-dimensional conceptual framework of leaders’ followership anti-prototypes, including insubordination, incompetence, and passivity. However, results from both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses consistently support a two-factor structure comprising dysfunction and insubordination, in which incompetence and passivity empirically merge into a single dimension. Compared with existing instruments, the scale developed in this study more accurately reflects the ways in which team leaders in Chinese higher education institutions cognitively construe followers’ anti-prototypical characteristics. The resulting scale provides a reliable measurement foundation for future empirical research and leadership interventions in higher education settings.

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