A central premise of leadership research is that leaders accomplish positive outcomes through their actions – they inspire, guide, motivate, and coach. By contrast, inactive approaches to leadership are seen as ineffective and harmful. We introduce the concept of forbearance leadership to demonstrate that a leader’s purposefully inactive leadership behaviors can enhance leader effectiveness and follower job performance. Leaders exhibit forbearance leadership when they choose not to intervene, even though they are capable of acting and aware of the opportunity to do so. Building on theories of human development, we introduce two dimensions of forbearance leadership – forbearance learning and forbearance nurturing. We develop and validate a measure of the two dimensions of forbearance leadership and demonstrate how they are distinct from other passive leadership behaviors. Across four separate samples involving a total of 632 followers and 136 leader-follower dyads, we find support for our two-dimensional framework of forbearance leadership. Both forbearance behaviors are positively associated with affective trust and satisfaction with supervision and negatively related to role ambiguity. In addition, the congruence between leader-intended and follower-perceived forbearance leadership at Time 1 increased follower task performance and job dedication at Time 2.
