Marc Hurwitz

The romance of the follower: part 1

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to provide a compelling argument that followership has significant practical value in enhancing career and organizational value; and, second, to encourage dialogue about followership. Part 2 will extend current ideas about followership to provide a more comprehensive, holistic model. Part 3 will show how the model can be used as a training tool, in mentoring, for performance appraisals, and in designing HR solutions.Design/methodology/approach – The strengths and weaknesses of current theories are highlighted, motivating both the need for making followership more visible within an organization and the need for a more comprehensive model.Findings – Good followers report higher career satisfaction, get promoted more often, and add greater value to their organizations. Moreover, followship skills can be developed.Originality/value – Previous research has focused on followship as either a fixed set of behaviours or traits, or as something a leader has to ...

Multimodal temporal perception deficits in a patient with left spatial neglect

We examined multisecond time estimation (up to 60 s) for visual and auditory events in a patient with left spatial neglect (RR), who grossly underestimated all durations in all tasks. In contrast, healthy controls and a patient with left hemisphere damage (HW) demonstrated accurate estimates of the same durations. These findings add to a growing body of literature suggesting that neglect cannot be understood simply in terms of a bias in orienting attention to one side of space. In addition, these data suggest that the right hemisphere parietal cortex may be important for the perception of time across multiple modalities.

Static versus dynamic judgments of spatial extent

Research exploring how scanning affects judgments of spatial extent has produced conflicting results. We conducted four experiments on line bisection judgments measuring ocular and pointing behavior, with line length, position, speed, acceleration, and direction of scanning manipulated. Ocular and pointing judgments produced distinct patterns. For static judgments (i.e., no scanning), the eyes were sensitive to position and line length with pointing much less sensitive to these factors. For dynamic judgments (i.e., scanning the line), bisection biases were influenced by the speed of scanning but not acceleration, while both ocular and pointing results varied with scan direction. We suggest that static and dynamic probes of spatial judgments are different. Furthermore, the substantial differences seen between static and dynamic bisection suggest the two invoke different neural processes for computing spatial extent for ocular and pointing judgments.

Functional MRI of dynamic judgments of spatial extent

Judgments of spatial relationships are often made when the object or observer is moving. Behaviourally, there is evidence that these ‘dynamic’ judgments of spatial extent differ from static judgments. For example, in one of the simplest probes of spatial extent—the line bisection task—the typically observed leftward bisection bias of about 1% of line length is increased considerably after left-to-right scanning. Here we used fMRI to examine whether or not different brain regions would be involved in static and dynamic judgments of spatial extent. Dynamic (i.e., scan the line prior to bisecting) relative to static ocular bisections (i.e., line bisection by fixation) produced activations in the cuneus and precuneus bilaterally, with reduced activation relative to static judgments observed in the supramarginal gyrus bilaterally. Dynamic bisections relative to a control condition (i.e., scan a line and then saccade to a transection mark) produced activations in the precuneus/superior parietal lobe bilaterally and left cerebellum. Only marginal evidence was found for different activations due to the initial scan direction of the line. These results highlight the fact that dynamic judgments of spatial extent use distinct brain regions from those employed to make static judgments, and the same mechanism is employed independent of scan direction. It may be the case that velocity processing and time estimates are integrated primarily in the cuneus and precuneus to produce estimates of spatial extent under dynamic scanning conditions.

Examining the influence of ‘noise’ on judgements of spatial extent

The line bisection task—commonly used as a clinical measure of unilateral neglect—requires participants to place a mark on a horizontal line to indicate where they think centre is. In general, results suggest that the allocation of attention mediates bisection. In addition, previous research shows that participants rarely explore the endpoints of lines, suggesting that peripheral visual information informs bisection. Here, we examined bisection performance under conditions in which differing levels of ‘noise’ were introduced to the line to examine the hypothesis that the fidelity and symmetry of peripheral information would inform performance. Contrary to our expectations, results showed that symmetrically introducing noise to the line biased bisection further leftward compared to a ‘no-noise’ condition. Furthermore, asymmetrical noise increased leftward bisection errors primarily when lines were presented in left space or when the greater amount of noise was on the left half of the line. These results indicate that the fidelity of peripheral visual information mediates bisection behaviour that is already biased leftwards probably due to right hemisphere attentional mechanisms.

Followership: A Classroom Exercise to Introduce the Concept.

Followership is valuable for personal and organizational success, whether success is measured by satisfaction with work, improved team relationships, obtaining promotions, or quality and quantity of work output. Furthermore, senior executives and coaches recognize it as a critical skill. Despite this, creating effective followership training in the classroom is challenging because of media messages that preference leadership, internal schemas held by students that ignore followership, and cultural biases against it. This article presents a memorable kinaesthetic, visual classroom activity that introduces followership in a theory-agnostic way. The exercise begins with students introducing each other as leaders or followers, and then debriefing that activity using the Describe, Analyze, and Evaluate methodology from multicultural training. Over a 10-year period, the exercise has successfully engaged undergraduate and graduate students, MBA candidates, and working professionals from frontline to senior management.

Exploring Distributed Leadership: A Leader–Follower Collaborative Lens

Animals demonstrate a rich repertoire of social interactions including leadership and followership. In this chapter, I apply a leader–follower lens to a selection of fish and wolf studies to investigate three questions: (1) are centralized, distributed, or leaderless groups most common; (2) when do each occur; and (3) how is followership manifested? The analysis suggests that leadership and followership are mutual influence processes; individuals frequently switch between the two but they preferentially enact one or the other depending on the task and circumstance. Distributed leadership (DL) was more commonly observed than either centralized or leaderless groups in the species studied, perhaps because it confers a fitness advantage. Using a leadership–followership perspective revealed that: followership training was more effective than leadership training; training followers to lead resulted in a reduction in following; the outcome of failed leadership attempts on future behavior depended on individual phenotype; first followers had an outsized influence on decision-making; and leading desensitized fish to the actions of their followers. Finally, wolf studies failed to support dominance hierarchy theory, namely the theory that dominance relationships exist to demarcate leadership relationships.