Leadership Research Summary:
- Although nearly two decades of research have provided support for the social identity approach to leadership, most previous work has focused on leaders’ identity prototypicality while neglecting the assessment of other equally important dimensions of social identity management. However, recent theoretical developments have argued that in order to mobilize and direct followers’ energies, leaders need not only to ‘be one of us’ (identity prototypicality), but also to ‘do it for us’ (identity advancement), to ‘craft a sense of us’ (identity entrepreneurship), and to ‘embed a sense of us’ (identity impresarioship). In the present research the study develops and validates an Identity Leadership Inventory(ILI) that assesses these dimensions in different contexts and with diverse samples from the US, China, and Belgium.
- Study 1 demonstrates that the scale has content validity such that the items meaningfully differentiate between the four dimensions. Studies 2, 3, and 4 provide evidence for the scale’s construct validity (distinguishing between dimensions), discriminant validity(distinguishing identity leadership from authentic leadership, leaders’ charisma, and perceived leader quality), and criterion validity (relating the ILI to key leadership outcomes). The study concludes that by assessing multiple facets of leaders’ social identity management the ILI has significant utility for both theory and practice.
Leadership Research Implications and Findings:
• The present research advances our theoretical and practical understanding of identity leadership in at least three important ways. First, prior theorizing on this topic had focused primarily on leader prototypicality while placing less emphasis on other equally important aspects of the social identity approach to leadership. Moreover, some of the research on leader prototypicality had relied on measures that were problematic to the extent that they assessed prototypicality simply in terms of ‘being average’ or ‘similar’ to other group members. Although in some circumstances this may be important, research suggests that rather than capturing averageness or maximal similarity to other group members, prototypicality is more likely to capture the ideal-type of what it means to be ‘one of us’ (Hogg et al., 2012, Steffens et al., 2013, van Knippenberg, 2011). This issue was addressed in the current scale by ensuring that items avoided reference to any suggestion that being prototypical is simply a question of being average, and instead focused on prototypicality as a matter of being exemplary (see also Bartel and Wiesenfeld, 2013, Turner, 1985).
• This is not to say, however, that we should ignore (or re-conduct) the wealth of previous work that has been conducted on leaders’ identity prototypicality (because its measurement might have been more precise or because it examines only one of the four dimensions that the study identified). On the contrary, this prior work has enabled researchers to gain valuable and informative insights into the leadership process. Nevertheless, going beyond this, researchers believe that the present studies suggest that there is much more to learn about leadership from future research which moves beyond any sense that identity leadership is simply about identity prototypicality (e.g., Halevy et al., 2011).
• Second, the current inventory was developed to afford assessment of additional, more novel, aspects of leaders’ identity work — specifically focusing on the degree to which leaders not only represent but also advance, craft, and embed a sense of shared social identity among followers (Haslam et al., 2011). By developing and validating scales that quantify group members’ perceptions of leaders’ achievements in these domains, the present research lays the foundations for new methodological and theoretical advancements.
• This is particularly important considering that previously researchers (a) have lacked refined measurements that might tap into leaders’ embedding of identity-structure and their active advancement of shared ingroup interests (Haslam and Platow, 2001, Haslam et al., 2011, van Knippenberg and van Knippenberg, 2005), and (b) have tended to employ more or less exclusively qualitative methods in the assessment of leaders’ identity entrepreneurship (Augoustinos and De Garis, 2012, Reicher and Hopkins, 2001, Reicher and Hopkins, 2003, Reicher et al., 2005).
• This has meant that while qualitative analyses support claims that, beyond prototypicality, identity leadership involves additional elements of active mobilization and identity shaping (Elsbach & Kramer, 1996) these aspects had not entered mainstream leadership theory and research. On the basis of the present contribution it should be easier for researchers to map this landscape quantitatively in the process of uncovering when, why, and how these additional dimensions of identity leadership augment leaders’ capacity to motivate followers to contribute to the achievement of group goals.
• Third, the social identity approach to leadership originated out of a strong theoretical and experimental tradition (Haslam et al., 2011, Hogg et al., 2012, van Knippenberg, 2011) and to date the translation of this approach into practice — including the development, delivery, and testing of leadership training or interventions — has been rather piecemeal (for a review see Avolio, Reichard, Hannah, Walumbwa, & Chan, 2009; but see Peters, Haslam, Ryan, & Steffens, 2014). A significant factor that has hampered efforts to use these insights for practical ends has been precisely our limited capacity to assess — and therefore provide ‘hard’ evidence for — the usefulness of the different dimensions of leaders’ social identity management.
• This instrumentation void contrasts not only with the various scales that have been developed on the basis of other leadership theories and that have (to varying degrees) been provided with empirical validation but also with the various tools (e.g., Myers–Briggs type measurements) that have failed such tests.
• By allowing for the measurement of identity leadership not only as a representational issue (in terms of perceived identity prototypicality), but also as a rhetorical, practical, and structural issue (in terms of identity entrepreneurship, advancement, and impresarioship), the present inventory can be used to advance theory and practice that strives for a more comprehensive examination of the science and art of leaders’ identity labor.
• The social identity approach to leadership has stimulated an important and exciting surge of research interest in recent years. Yet while this has served to advance a credible theory of leadership, to date the contribution of this work has been somewhat peripheral to the field as a whole.
• In part, this had been due to an overemphasis on leader prototypicality at the expense of other aspects of leaders’ identity management. To address this lacuna, the present paper has expanded upon prior research and theory by developing and validating a novel instrument — the Identity Leadership Inventory (ILI) — that assesses the extent to which leaders not only represent but also create, advance, and embed a shared sense of ‘us’ (i.e., a shared social identity).
• In this way, the ILI allows researchers and practitioners alike to assess and chart more richly the various ways in which leaders achieve influence by engaging with followers in ways that transform a psychology of ‘you’ and ‘I’ into a psychology of ‘we’ and ‘us’. Going forward, researchers are excited about the prospect of empirical and theoretical projects that will employ this tool to furnish the field with a better, more detailed, and integrative understanding of these various facets of identity leadership as they are made manifest in leaders’ and followers’ efforts to work together to build the organizations and communities of the future.