PSYC 644 Week 6 Reflective Essay Example

Reflective Essay: From Yes-Person to Courageous Follower, Rethinking My Role Under Leaders Through Research and Scripture

Introduction

For most of my eight years as an operations analyst at a regional bank, I was the employee every manager wanted. I met deadlines, never complained and agreed with almost everything. I took pride in being low maintenance. If I disagreed with a decision, I kept it to myself, reasoning that leaders saw more of the picture than I did and that my job was to execute. I thought of this as loyalty, and I thought of loyalty as the essence of good followership.

Two years ago, that picture cracked. A new fee schedule for small business accounts was rolled out with customer disclosures that I believed were misleading, and I had to decide whether to say so. This course, and especially the reading on followership, has given me language for what happened in me before and after that decision. This essay reflects on what followership is, what research says about it and what Scripture teaches, and it examines my own experience in that light.

Rethinking Followership

Johnson (2019) argues that followers are not passive recipients of leadership but active participants who share responsibility for the ethical health of their organizations. Followers outnumber leaders, they carry out most of the organization's work and their choices determine whether leaders' decisions, good or bad, succeed. Johnson emphasizes that followers face their own ethical challenges, including the temptation to obey without question, to remain silent in the face of wrongdoing and to protect themselves at others' expense. Reading this was uncomfortable. I had treated silence as a virtue, but Johnson describes it as one of the follower's characteristic ethical failures. He also warns against the opposite error, a cynical stance in which followers assume the worst about leaders and withdraw their effort. Neither silent compliance nor cynical distance serves an organization well. What Johnson calls for is engaged, thoughtful followership that supports leaders while holding them, and oneself, to ethical standards.

Kelley (1988), in an influential essay, argued that organizations depend on followers far more than they acknowledge and that good followers share specific qualities. He described followers along two dimensions: the degree to which they think independently and critically, and the degree to which they actively engage in their work. Effective followers do both. In his account, they run their own work without close supervision, give themselves to causes larger than their careers, keep sharpening their skills and act bravely when it counts. By contrast, yes-people engage actively but think dependently, enthusiastically doing whatever they are told. I recognized myself immediately. I was energetic, reliable and almost entirely uncritical. Kelley's other types were familiar too. A colleague who had been passed over for promotion fit his description of the alienated follower, sharp in her criticism but no longer willing to put effort behind it. Another fit the survivor, adjusting his views to whichever manager held power that year. Seeing all of us on Kelley's grid made me realize that the bank had plenty of energy and plenty of criticism but very little of the two together.

What Research Shows About Followers

Followership research has moved from describing types of followers to asking how followers understand their role and how that understanding shapes leadership itself. Carsten et al. (2010) interviewed 31 employees from a range of organizations about what it means to be a follower. Their participants' views fell along a continuum. Some held passive beliefs, seeing their role as deferring to leaders and doing what they were told. Others saw followership as active, offering opinions when asked while remaining loyal. A third group described proactive followership, in which followers take initiative, voice concerns and challenge leaders constructively because they see themselves as partners in achieving the organization's goals. The researchers also found that context mattered: empowering leaders and climates encouraged proactive behavior, while authoritarian ones pushed even proactive individuals toward silence.

Uhl-Bien et al. (2014), reviewing the field, proposed that followership should be studied both as a role, with its own characteristics and behaviors, and as part of a process in which leaders and followers construct leadership together through their interactions. On this view, leadership is not something leaders do to followers. It emerges from what both do. When followers never question or contribute, leaders lose information they need, and the leadership that results is weaker.

These findings explained my own history. My passive beliefs about followership were not simply personality; they had been reinforced by managers early in my career who did not welcome questions. But I also had to admit that my silence had contributed to decisions I privately thought were poor. I had been helping to construct leadership, just not the kind I would have chosen. The research also suggested that the remedy was not simply a change of personality. If followership is partly constructed in relationships, then I could begin to change it by changing how I interacted with my managers, one conversation at a time.

Courageous Followership

Johnson (2019) draws on Chaleff's concept of the courageous follower to describe what followers owe their organizations and leaders. Chaleff (2009) argues that followers and leaders both serve a common purpose, and that followers need courage in several forms: to assume responsibility for themselves and the organization, to serve leaders by supporting their work, to challenge leaders when their behavior or decisions threaten the common purpose, to participate in transformation when change is needed and to take moral action, including refusal, when they cannot in conscience comply. The concept struck me because it joins loyalty and challenge rather than opposing them. A courageous follower is not a rebel. In banking, I could see each dimension. Assuming responsibility meant treating customer trust as my concern, not only the compliance department's. Serving meant helping my manager succeed with the rollout. Challenging meant telling her what the complaint data showed. Participating in transformation meant helping redesign the disclosure rather than only criticizing it. Moral action would have meant declining to process the rollout if the bank had insisted on a letter I believed was deceptive, a step I am grateful I did not need to take. Chaleff describes challenge as a form of service, because a leader who hears honest concerns can avoid mistakes that would harm both the leader and the organization.

Reflecting on My Own Experience

The fee schedule decision tested all of this. Our bank introduced a new monthly maintenance fee for small business accounts that fell below a balance threshold. The disclosure sent to customers described the change in a way that technically met the regulation but buried the fee amount in the third paragraph of a letter headlined as an announcement of "enhanced services." In my role, I reviewed the operational rollout, and I saw early complaint data showing that many customers were surprised by the charges.

My first instinct was the old one: the compliance team had approved the letter, and it was not my place to question it. For about two weeks, I said nothing. During that time, I noticed myself using the very rationalizations we had studied earlier in the course. Others were responsible. The letter was legal. Customers should read their mail. I recognized these as ways of keeping my conscience quiet.

What finally moved me was a call I overheard between a branch employee and the owner of a small bakery who had been charged three months of fees she did not know about, and who said simply, "I trusted you." That evening, I drafted a short memo to my manager. I described the complaint pattern, quoted the headline and the placement of the fee and proposed a revised letter with the fee amount in the first sentence and a one-time waiver for affected customers. I tried to follow Chaleff's advice to frame the challenge as service to the bank's purpose, which publicly emphasized trust with local businesses.

My manager's first response was defensive, and I briefly regretted speaking up. A week later, though, she forwarded the memo to the head of small business banking, who agreed to revise future letters and approved waivers for customers who complained. Not everything I proposed was adopted, but the experience changed me. I learned that challenge offered respectfully, with evidence and a proposed solution, was received far better than I had feared, and I learned that my years of silence had not been loyalty at all. They had been a kind of absence. I had withheld the one thing my manager could not get from a report: my honest judgment about how the decision would affect people.

The experience also changed my relationship with my manager. In our next one-on-one meeting, she told me she had been frustrated at first because she felt blindsided, and we agreed that in the future I would raise concerns with her privately before putting them in writing to anyone else. That conversation was itself a lesson in followership. Courage needs tact, and the way a concern is raised can determine whether a leader is able to hear it. I had been right about the letter but clumsy in assuming that a memo was the first step rather than a conversation.

Looking back with Kelley's dimensions in mind, I see that my critical thinking had always been present but unspoken. What changed was engagement of a different kind: I began to treat my judgment as something the organization needed rather than something to suppress. Carsten et al. (2010) found that context shapes proactive followership, and I believe my manager's eventual openness made it easier for me to speak again. I have done so several times since, on smaller matters.

A Biblical Perspective on Followership

Scripture holds together two truths about followers that I had separated. The first is genuine respect for authority. Ephesians 6:5-7 calls servants to obey their earthly masters with sincerity of heart, rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to people (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016). Paul's words speak to an ancient institution very different from modern employment, yet the principle of wholehearted service applies. Followers are called to do good work, support their leaders and avoid the cynicism that undermines organizations.

The second truth is that human authority is never ultimate. When the apostles were ordered to stop teaching, Peter and the others answered that they must obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29). Their refusal was not rebellion for its own sake but faithfulness to a higher obligation. Followers have consciences, and there are times when compliance would mean wrongdoing. Romans 13:1, which calls believers to be subject to governing authorities, is sometimes read as requiring unconditional obedience, but Acts 5 shows that the apostles themselves understood submission to have limits where God's commands are at stake.

The prophet Nathan offers another model. Sent to confront King David after his sin against Uriah, Nathan told a story about a rich man who took a poor man's only lamb, allowing David to recognize the injustice before Nathan applied it to him (2 Samuel 12:1-7). Nathan's approach combined courage with wisdom about how a leader could hear hard truth.

The story of Daniel shows how these truths work together. When Daniel was assigned food he believed would defile him, he did not defy his overseer publicly. He asked permission, proposed a ten-day test of vegetables and water and invited the official to judge the results (Daniel 1:8-16). Daniel combined conviction with respect and creativity, offering a solution that protected his overseer from risk. That is close to what Chaleff describes as courageous followership, and it is the pattern I tried, imperfectly, to follow with the fee letter: respectful, specific and oriented toward a solution.

Commitments Going Forward

Reflection matters only if it changes behavior. I have made three commitments. First, when I disagree with a decision that affects customers or colleagues, I will raise it within a week, in writing if necessary, with evidence and a proposed alternative. Second, I will practice voicing small concerns regularly, so that speaking up becomes habitual rather than heroic. Third, as I move toward supervising others, I will invite challenge from the people who report to me, since the research suggests that leaders shape whether followers feel free to speak. I plan to ask a simple question at the end of team meetings, "What are we missing?", and to thank people publicly when their concerns improve a decision, so that the next quiet analyst on my team learns early that honest judgment is welcome.

Conclusion

I began this course believing that good followers are quiet and loyal. I now understand followership as an active role with its own ethical responsibilities, one in which loyalty sometimes requires disagreement. Johnson's account of followers' ethical challenges, Kelley's distinction between effective followers and yes-people, research showing that followers help construct leadership and Chaleff's call to courage all point in the same direction. Scripture deepens that direction, calling followers to serve sincerely while remembering that their first obedience belongs to God. My experience with the fee letter showed me that the courage to speak, offered with respect, can serve the bank and the customers who keep it in business. The bakery owner who said "I trusted you" reminded me that followership is never only about the person above me; it is also about the people my work reaches.

References

Carsten, M. K., Uhl-Bien, M., West, B. J., Patera, J. L., & McGregor, R. (2010). Exploring social constructions of followership: A qualitative study. The Leadership Quarterly, 21(3), 543-562. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2010.03.015

Chaleff, I. (2009). The courageous follower: Standing up to and for our leaders (3rd ed.). Berrett-Koehler.

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Johnson, C. E. (2019). Organizational ethics: A practical approach (4th ed.). SAGE.

Kelley, R. E. (1988). In praise of followers. Harvard Business Review, 66(6), 142-148.

Uhl-Bien, M., Riggio, R. E., Lowe, K. B., & Carsten, M. K. (2014). Followership theory: A review and research agenda. The Leadership Quarterly, 25(1), 83-104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2013.11.007