To survive and thrive in the long-term, organizations are faced with the key task of inspiring followers to become the next generation of leaders and to equip them to move into future leadership roles once incumbents move on or new opportunities arise. For this reason, organizations strongly focus on planning and investing into issues of leader successions and development. For example, in PwC’s 20th Annual Global CEO Survey, 77% of CEOs identified developing human talent, including leadership, as a top key priority (PwC, 2012). Literature on strategic human resources management defines leadership succession as a set of HR activities that: (1) organizations use to identify talented employees who “show potential to become more than they currently are” (Silzer & Church, 2009, p.4), and (2) provide these potential leaders with guidance and training to become future organizational leaders (Heneman, Judge, & Kammeyer-Mueller, 2015). This literature highlights the positive outcomes of leadership succession planning, since it enables organizations to get “the right person in the right job at the right time” (Cappelli & Keller, 2014, p.306), and invest their scarce resources in those where chances on returns will be the highest (Collings & Mellahi, 2009; Felin & Hesterly, 2007). Speaking to the above resource-based perspective, prior research has investigated various strategic aspects of leadership succession — primarily at the very top levels of organizations (Garman & Glawe, 2004). For example, research has examined succession as a function of whether the successor (a) originates from within or outside the company (Shen & Cannella, 2002), (b) is similar to, or different from, the previous leader (Ritter & Lord, 2007), (c) is a man or a woman (Ryan & Haslam, 2007), and (d) implements little or significant change (Zhang & Rajagopalan, 2010). Yet scholars have argued that there is a need to better understand the motivational effects associated with evaluations about leadership potential, especially for individuals at lower organizational levels (Gelens, Dries, Hofmans, & Pepermans, 2013). After all, leadership succession demands the singling out of a chosen few at the expense of the many, since organizations consider only a small proportion (5–۲۰%) of people in a cohort to be eligible for succession programs (Malik & Singh, 2014). Thus, the vast majority of individuals will be excluded from leadership successions, but are still expected to remain motivated followers. Accordingly, in this paper we address the question of how feedback about the lack of leadership potential may impact leadership ambition, organizational commitment, and performance. These three outcomes represent defining features of follower motivation (Judge & Kammeyer-Mueller, 2012; Meyer, Stanley, Herscovitch, & Topolnytsky, 2002).