Leadership Research Summary:
- Recent trends in the leadership literature have promoted a social identity approach of leadership that views leadership as the process of representing, advancing, creating, and embedding a sense of shared identity within a group. However, a few empirical studies explore how and when global identity leadership affects team performance at the workplace. To address this lacuna, researchers used multi-source and two-wave data among 81 teams to explore the role of group-based pride and leader political skill in the association between identity leadership and team performance. `
- The results suggest that identity leadership positively predicts team performance through a mediating role of group-based pride. Furthermore, leader political skill moderates the indirect effect of group-based pride such that the effect is stronger when leader political skill is high rather than low.
Leadership Research Findings:
- The results of this study provide several practical implications for managers. Firstly, the results suggest that identity leadership can contribute to team performance. Thus, the study recommends that managers should engage in more identity leadership behaviors to obtain better work outcomes. Moreover, identity leadership needs boundary conditions to produce more positive team performance.
- The current study suggests that leader political skill is a key moderator in the impact of identity leadership on team effectiveness. Politically skilled leaders can access to various information and deliver to their ideas to followers effectively, which strengthens the positive effect of identity leadership. Therefore, managers can improve their political skills to enhance their influence on group members.
- Secondly, the results also find that group-based pride drives employees to invest more effort to achieve group goals. The study calls for future intervention studies to consider these findings and focus on cultivating a sense of pride within the group.
- The research findings show that identity leadership may provide a feasible pathway to form a sense of shared identity, which provides the basic condition for group-based pride. Researchers and practitioners could use early interventions to improve identity leadership skills (Haslam et al., 2017; Slater and Barker, 2019). Additionally, managers can also use other strategies to cultivate a sense of pride within a group to improve team effectiveness.