Breadcrumbs to transformational acts: Enacting implicit leader prototypes to become psychologically empowered as a...

Despite recent critiques, transformational leadership continues to be of immense interest to both scholars and practitioners. Typical approaches to facilitating transformational leadership tend to view it as a between-leader style of leadership-one that is often considered to flow from stable leader traits and/or that leaders can be trained to execute in a one-time or intermittent manner. We offer an alternative approach. Drawing from theory on the process of psychological empowerment, we suggest that transformational action is most likely to emerge in discrete moments when one feels psychologically empowered (i.e., moments when one experiences a sense of meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact) as a leader. In line with the prescriptions offered by the theory, we develop tangible and actionable implicit leader prototype interventions tailored to provide leader-relevant "microwins" that foster such psychological empowerment within leaders. To test our theorizing that implicit leader prototype interventions trigger a state of psychological empowerment conducive to subsequent transformational action (as rated by the self, others, and multiple direct reports), we conduct three studies-a preregistered pilot experiment, a 15-day within-person experimental experience sampling method field study, and a preregistered within-leader field experiment. Taken together, our work provides a prescriptive and theoretically grounded means by which to cultivate transformational leadership in everyday organizational life through brief implicit leader prototype interventions that build a leader's psychological empowerment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).