Why do I like thee: Is it your performance or my orders?

Examined the extent to which employee evaluations are determined by the leader's influence tactics and the assessments of followers' motives rather than by their performance. 113 business majors were randomly assigned to act as authoritarian or democratic leaders of 5-person work groups that manufactured model airplanes. Measures of leader influence tactics, leader assessments of the extent to which followers were either internally or externally motivated to work effectively, and leader evaluations of followers were gathered at the end of the work session. The number of airplane models produced was used as the performance measure. It was found that (a) the democratic leaders perceived the followers as internally motivated to work effectively, (b) the leaders' perception of the followers as internally motivated was strongly related to favorable evaluations of the followers, and (c) the leaders' employee evaluations were not related to the followers' performance. Findings are discussed in terms of previous research that has linked the use of power to evaluations of followers. (14 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)