DISTANCE BY DESIGN: AUTHORITY, FOCUS, AND AFFILIATION MOTIVES OF LEADER DISTANCE

Research Seminar

Management & Human Resources

Speaker: Richard Ronay

Amsterdam Business School

room Bernard Ramanantsoa

In this talk, I argue that leaders often choose closeness or remoteness to serve distinct motives – authority and status (signaling legitimacy, hierarchy, and control), task and focus (protecting attention, reducing noise, concentrating decision bandwidth), and affiliation development (relationship building, coaching, and repair). These motives are shaped by leaders’ implicit leadership theories and enacted through concrete distance acts that function as signals (what is emitted) and filters (what access, information, and interaction are allowed through). As an empirical illustration of motive-driven distancing, I present evidence that dominance orientation (a volatile rank strategy rooted in coercion) predicts greater leader-enacted physical distance, in part because dominance is associated with lower baseline trust in followers. Together, my argument reframes leader distance as a motivated, interpretable and adjustable leadership mechanism, and identifies dominance-related distrust as one pathway through which power motives can translate into everyday patterns of access and separation.