A SOCIAL IDENTITY MODEL OF LEADERSHIP EFFECTIVENESS IN ORGANIZATIONS
Section snippets
A SOCIAL IDENTITY MODEL OF LEADERSHIP EFFECTIVENESS IN ORGANIZATIONS
What makes leadership in organizations effective? This is a fundamental theoretical and practical question that continues to tax organizational leadership researchers. To be effective, leaders must be able to motivate and direct followers towards group or organizational goals, mission, or vision, and be able to maintain stability and group harmony even when acting as agents of change (e.g. Chemers, 2001, Yukl, 2001). What, then, makes leaders effective in achieving this? For an answer,
A SOCIAL IDENTITY ANALYSIS OF LEADERSHIP EFFECTIVENESS
As noted above, theories of leadership effectiveness in organizations tend to underemphasize the fact that leaders are also members of the groups they lead, and that therefore characteristics of the leader as a group member may influence leadership effectiveness. The social identity approach provides a very different perspective from which to understand leadership processes – one that suggests that group membership becomes a strong influence on attitudes and behavior as individuals identify
SIMOL AND OTHER THEORIES OF LEADERSHIP EFFECTIVENESS IN ORGANIZATIONS
The basic propositions of SIMOL are well-supported by experimental and survey research. Even so, to be a significant perspective on leadership effectiveness in organizations, SIMOL must have added value – it needs to go beyond existing theories of leadership effectiveness in research in organizational behavior. This added value lies in: (a) a focus on group membership characteristics of the leader; and (b) a focus on group identification and identity salience as moderators of leadership
TOWARDS AN INTEGRATIVE THEORY OF LEADERSHIP EFFECTIVENESS
We have seen how SIMOL can extend three influential and at first sight quite different perspectives on leadership effectiveness in organizations (leadership categorization theories, LMX theory, and theories of charismatic leadership). The social identity model of organizational leadership is not only important in integrating and extending these perspectives on leadership effectiveness, it also provides a viable framework to integrate developments in leadership research. Indeed, one of the
CONCLUSION
The starting point of our analysis of leadership effectiveness was the observation that leadership research has largely ignored the implications of the fact that leaders do not only lead groups of people, but also are members of these groups, and that leadership processes are therefore enacted in the context of a shared group membership. To address this issue, we propose a theoretical framework to analyze leadership effectiveness in organizations from this leaders-as-group-members perspective,
Acknowledgements
We thank Barbara van Knippenberg for her valuable comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript.
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