Researchers have continued to explore the impact that impression management (IM) behaviors have on emerging as an informal leader based on the perceptions of one's peers (Hanna, 2021a, 2021b). Such studies have proposed that individuals use these behaviors as signals of characteristics befitting of an emergent leader, such as being seen as trustworthy. But are all such personal characteristics equally relevant to predicting leader emergence across team contexts? Construal-level theory (CLT; Trope & Liberman, 2010) suggests that the length of the team's outcome time horizon may determine when peers see certain qualities as characteristic of emergent leadership and when they do not. In this paper, we apply CLT to the relationships between IM behaviors, trustworthiness, and leader emergence, arguing that peers will evaluate leadership qualities differently based on the temporal context (i.e., short-term and long-term) of their current team collaboration. We test hypotheses using two different samples, one working in short-term collaboration (90 minutes; 189 individuals, 52 teams) and one in long-term collaboration (12 weeks; 191 individuals, 53 teams). Results suggest that behaviors and perceptions relating to one's ability to achieve the task at hand are always relevant to leader emergence across contexts, while those related to one's benevolence are only relevant to emergent leadership in longer-term collaboration contexts. Based on CLT and these initial findings, we suggest that individuals may prioritize task-related abilities and behaviors in shorter-term team contexts, while considering a broader range of interpersonal qualities, like benevolence, in longer-term team contexts.
