The way “we are” as people taking part in organisational life takes shape based on each unique work environment, yet it is safe to say that in the main, we have decided that engendering engagement is the leader’s job. We have built frameworks and trained executives accordingly, and we have measured leadership effectiveness and tweaked management styles wearing this lens. All the while, we have largely ignored the other half of the equation. The follower.
This is not simply an oversight. It reflects a deeply held assumption about how organisations work: that the leadership flow is downward, and that the employees who receive it are, at best, energetic implementers. In South Africa, where organisations are navigating the tension between hierarchical tradition and the communal ethics of Ubuntu, this assumption deserves to be examined very carefully indeed.
The truth is, that engagement is not a magic ingredient that is dispensed from the top. It is co-authored. And understanding why requires us to revisit what we believe followership actually is.
The science of what we assume about followers
In 2010, organisational psychologist Thomas Sy published what has become a foundational study in the field of followership research. His investigation into Implicit Followership Theories (IFTs) showed that both leaders and employees carry deeply internalised mental outlines, or schemas, about what a follower is and should be. These schemas are not conscious policies. They are cognitive shortcuts, shaped through experience, culture, and observation, that impact on how we treat people and how people treat themselves at work.
Sy identified a six-factor model of follower prototypes. The positive dimensions, which he termed the “followership prototype,” included industry, enthusiasm, and good citizenship. The negative dimensions, he clustered as the “followership antiprototype.” These included conformity, insubordination, and incompetence.
Critically, his research found that when leaders hold positive implicit theories about their followers, they tend to set higher expectations, grant more autonomy, and develop stronger working relationships. When they hold negative implicit theories, the reverse follows. Followers, in turn, often perform in line with the expectations they sense being held of them.
For South African managers, this has immediate practical significance. If your mental model of the people who report to you defaults to compliance-seeker or passive implementer, you are not managing a neutral situation. You are actively shaping the conditions that produce exactly that outcome.
Reframing followership as agency
The dominant narrative in organisational life positions followers as recipients of leadership. They receive vision, instruction, strategy, and feedback. Their role, in this framing, is fundamentally reactive. Carsten, Uhl-Bien and colleagues challenged this framing in their landmark 2010 qualitative study, in which they identified meaningfully different social constructions of the follower role. Some individuals did indeed describe followership as deference and compliance. But a significant group described something altogether different: a proactive orientation, in which followership meant co-producing outcomes, contributing ideas, challenging assumptions, and holding themselves accountable for shared results.
In 2014, Uhl-Bien, Riggio, Lowe and Carsten formalised this into Followership Theory, positioning followers as active participants in a co-constructed leadership process. In their framework, constructionist approaches see followers as actively shaping leadership itself through the quality, nature, and intent of their following behaviours. Leadership, in this view, does not precede followership. The two are produced together, in context, through relational dynamics that neither party controls alone.
This is not a semantic distinction. It has measurable consequences. Followers with what the researchers call a co-production orientation engage in higher levels of voice, constructive challenge, proactive problem-solving, and discretionary effort. They are more difficult to steer toward unethical compliance because they hold a sense of personal accountability for shared outcomes, rather than deferring entirely to positional authority.
Ubuntu and the co-authorship of organisational life
Here is where the African philosophical tradition offers something that Western leadership has taken far longer to articulate. Ubuntu, the Nguni Bantu philosophy expressed in the proverb umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (a person is a person through other persons), does not place the individual in isolation. Identity itself is relational and communal. There is no self that exists prior to relationship.
In a 2012 address, Reuel Khoza, one of South Africa’s most respected voices on Ubuntu leadership, identified that in the African tradition, leadership is achieved, not given. The leader’s moral authority is fashioned in encounter with community. This is not a metaphor. It is a structural claim about how influence works in a society shaped by Ubuntu values: the capacity to lead is a product of the community’s recognition and support, not merely of formal appointment.
What this means for followership is profound. In an Ubuntu-informed organisational context, following is not subordination. It is a form of communal co-creation. The follower who contributes, challenges constructively, and invests their full capability is not exceeding their role. They are fulfilling it. They are exercising the relational accountability that Ubuntu demands.
This reframing has real traction in the South African workplace, where many employees carry an implicit Ubuntu ethic that management frameworks often fail to activate. When leaders treat their people as passive implementers, they are not simply limiting individual potential. They are severing the relational thread on which Ubuntu-informed engagement depends.
What this means for middle and senior managers
The implications for your company are not abstract. Your implicit theories about followers determine what you communicate, what you expect, and what you tolerate. If your team meetings are characterised by top-down direction and minimal challenge, it is worth asking whether the silence is a reflection of the implicit contract you have established rather than a lack of ideas or investment.
Engagement that is co-authored requires leaders who are genuinely curious about what their people think. It requires structures that make contribution safe. And it requires a willingness to examine the assumptions that currently govern how followership is understood and rewarded in your organisation.
The research is consistent: followers who believe their role is to co-produce outcomes are more engaged, more ethical in moments of pressure, and more effective partners in navigating complexity. They are not a risk to your authority. They are its most important champions.
The question is whether your organisation is designed to produce them.
4Seeds works with leadership teams to examine the implicit assumptions that quietly govern how followership is understood and rewarded in their organisations. We help managers recognise the difference between compliance and co-authorship, create the conditions in which people feel safe to contribute fully, and build cultures where engagement is something people genuinely bring rather than something they are expected to perform.
If you want to explore what followership really looks like in your organisation, click here to to read more on our website.