Self-vs.-Teammate Assessment of Leadership Competence: The Effects of Gender, Leadership Self-Efficacy, and Motivation to Lead

A sample (N=81) of undergraduates participating in a semester-long team-project engineering course completed assessments of their leadership competence, motivation to lead, and leadership self-efficacy, as well as the leadership competence of their peers who served within their durable teams. Results indicated that peers scored students lower than students scored themselves; that males deflated the transactional leadership scores of the female peers they assessed; and that the strongest individual predictor of teammate-assigned scores was a student’s affective-identity motivation to lead (i.e. the degree to which they considered themselves a natural leader). Leadership self-efficacy failed to significantly predict teammate scores.