Leadership and Power

Identity Processes in Groups and Organizations

Daan Van Knippenberg, Michael A Hogg, Daan Van Knippenberg, Michael A Hogg

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781446239988
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Leadership and associated power issues lie at the core of group life in a variety of contexts. Even the most informal of groups typically have some form of leadership in their organization, and the understanding of leadership and power from a psychological standpoint can inform a greater understanding of group dynamics both inside and outside of the workplace.

Leadership and Power is a synthesis of contributions from eminent social psychologists and organizational scientists that addresses these issues from a fresh perspective. In recent years, these themes have been re-examined through the lens of social categorization approaches that highlight people?s social identity and social roles as group members, as well as the processes that influence perceptions of and expectations about people and groups. The book is wide-ranging; chapters cover such diverse issues as: interpersonal versus group-oriented styles of leadership; leadership of totalist groups; political leadership; and gender and leadership. It represents a state-of-the-art overview of this burgeoning field that will be important to a host of disciplines.

Elements of cross-referencing to highlight thematic links as well as effective chapter conclusions will make the text appealing to advanced students taking courses in social and organizational psychology, management and organization studies, not just scholars interested in these themes.

1	Identity, Leadership, and Power: Preface and Introduction

DAAN VAN KNIPPENBERG
AND MICHAEL A. HOGG

 

The study of leadership and power has always been a core concern for the social and behavioral sciences. Leadership is inextricably tied to group membership. Studying leadership therefore inevitably leads to questions concerning the social psychology of leadership. Somewhat surprisingly, however, for several decades leadership research has held a very modest position within social psychology. Recently, all this has changed, and leadership and power have re-emerged as important research themes in social psychology. These recent developments have been paralleled by, and fed into, developments in leadership research in the organizational sciences. This reinvigorated interest does not just pick up where earlier social psychological research left off, but approaches leadership and power from a new perspective. Although analyses vary in specific focus and emphasis, they have in common the fact that they are informed by social categorization theories which highlight individuals’ social identity as group members and the role of social categorization processes in perceptions of and expectations about people and groups. This emphasis on social categorization and identity is paralleled by a similar development in the organizational sciences, where identity and the self-concept have gradually assumed center stage in behavioral research on leadership (e.g., Lord, Brown, and Freiberg, 1999; Shamir, House, and Arthur, 1993). This book is the first to bring together, in a single volume, proponents of these exciting new developments in research on leadership and power.

A key perspective in the social categorization approach to leadership and power is provided by social identity theories. Broadly defined, that is theories that are grounded in the concept of social identity as a self-construal in terms of one’s membership of social groups (e.g., Brewer, 1991; Brewer and Gardner, 1996; Hogg and Abrams, 1988; Tajfel and Turner, 1986; Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, and Wetherell, 1987). Because leadership is pre-eminently a group process (e.g., Chemers, 2001), an analysis in social identity terms is ideally suited to tackle issues of leadership and power.

Social identity theories were originally developed to understand intergroup relations (see e.g., Tajfel, 1982; Brewer and Brown, 1998). More recently, however, it has been emphasized that, because they explain how our group memberships guide our perceptions of self and others, our beliefs and attitudes, and our behavior in the context of salient group memberships, social identity theories are suited to understand self-definition, perceptions, attitudes, and behavior in all group contexts (e.g., Hogg, 1996). This has turned the attention of social identity researchers more towards group processes within small groups, and accordingly more towards issues that are of importance in organizational contexts (e.g., Haslam, 2001; Haslam, van Knippenberg, Platow, and Ellemers, in press; Hogg and Terry, 2000, 2001a). This refocus has included leadership and power.

Accordingly, from the mid-1990s, a number of social identity studies and analyses of leadership have been published (e.g., Duck and Fielding, 1999; Haslam and Platow, 2001; Turner and Haslam, 2001; Reicher and Hopkins, 1999). Part of what set the stage for this book, and what positioned us for the role of editors of this volume, is our own work in this field. For many years we have explored social identity processes in organizational contexts. For example, at the University of Queensland, one of the key activities of the Center for Research on Group Processes over the last 12 years has been precisely this integration – which recently produced an edited book (Hogg and Terry, 2001a) and an Academy of Management Review article (Hogg and Terry, 2000). We have run, in 1997 and 2000, workshops on social identity in organizational contexts, sponsored by the Kurt Lewin Institute in the Netherlands. We also ran a conference in Amsterdam in 2000 sponsored by the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology, which was published as a special issue of the journal Group Processes and Intergroup Relations (van Knippenberg and Hogg, 2001). This integration of social identity and organizational analyses has always had a strong emphasis on leadership processes. In addition, over the past eight years or so, outside of this organizational link, we have worked on and developed a social identity model of leadership (e.g., Hains, Hogg, and Duck, 1997; Hogg, 1996, 2001a, 2001b; Hogg, Hains, and Mason, 1998; Hogg and van Knippenberg, in press; Platow and van Knippenberg, 2001; van Knippenberg, van Knippenberg and van Dijk, 2000). This analysis very broadly states that in high salience groups with which people identify strongly, leadership effectiveness is significantly influenced by how prototypical of the group the leader is perceived to be by the members.

The social identity perspective may be an important perspective in the new approach to leadership and power, but it is by no means the only perspective. Approaches that are more rooted in the social cognition tradition, with its focus on information processing and impression formation, have made important contributions to our understanding of leadership and power. An important perspective in this tradition is leadership categorization theory developed by Lord and associates (e.g., Lord, Foti, and DeVader, 1984; Lord and Maher, 1991), which focuses on the social cognitive processes that underlie leadership perceptions. More recently, this approach has been expanded to include theories of self-construal and social identity (Lord and Brown, 2001; Lord et al., 1999), thus providing a strong basis for further integration of social identity theories and social cognitive information processing theories of leadership. From a similar social cognitive perspective, there has also been considerable development in research on social power that focuses on the way power differentials affect information processing, stereotyping, and prejudice (e.g., Fiske, 1993; Goodwin, Gubin, Fiske & Yzerbyt, 2000). Although not with such a clear social cognitive basis, work on role identities has also been well attuned to the category-based shared social schemas that underlie the likelihood that individuals with different demographic backgrounds will be able to successfully assume leadership positions (e.g., Eagly and Karau, 2002; Ridgeway, 2001).

Inspired by the burgeoning of this field and the multitude of perspectives that all share a common basis in theories of social categorization, social identity, and social roles, and by our own enthusiasm for, and involvement in, the social identity analysis of leadership, we decided to edit this volume. Feeling that such a volume was timely, our aim was to integrate all these perspectives and approaches in a single forum. We hope this book will provide both a state-ofthe-art overview of this burgeoning field, and a focal point for further theoretical integration and future research agendas.

The Future

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This book underscores a new revival of leadership research in social psychology – a revival that is growing in strength as new opportunities for research are recognized. There are at least three important new directions that emerge from the chapters in this volume.

All the chapters in this volume share a common basis in theories of social categorization, social identity, and social roles. At the same time, however, they are very diverse in emphasis and terminology, and in the work leading up to the present chapters it often is just as easy not to see the common ground shared by some analyses as it is to see the common ground shared by others. One of the things we hope to accomplish with this volume is to make the links and overlap between these different analyses more visible, thus placing firmly on the agenda for future research further integration of these approaches.

One important new direction is an exploration of the interplay of social identity analyses of leadership and organizational science theories of leadership effectiveness. A number of the chapters in this book have started to explore charismatic and transformational leadership and leader-member exchange – probably now the two dominant perspectives on leadership in the organizational sciences. This is an exciting development, because it opens up the possibility of integrating major perspectives on effective leadership from social psychology and from the organizational sciences that have so far largely led separate lives. The key to this integration seems to lie in the social identity processes that are highlighted in the present volume (e.g., De Cremer, Chapter 7; De Cremer and van Knippenberg, 2002; Haslam and Platow, 2001; Hogg et al., Chapter 3; Hogg and van Knippenberg, in press; Platow et al., Chapter 4; Lord and Brown, 2003; Lord et al., 1999; Lord and Hall, Chapter 5).

Another new direction is an examination of the ways social identities shape and are shaped by leaders’ behavior (for example the chapters by Kramer, Reicher and Hopkins, and Reid and Ng). Within this perspective two key questions concern how leaders construct and communicate their leadership properties and their group prototypicality, and how leadership may be constrained by leaders’ self-construal. These are important research questions that have so far been under-represented in research. Moreover, as is evident from these chapters, much of the research in this area has relied on analysis of case material. Expanding and extending the volume of research in this area and complementing the present analyses with quantitative and experimental studies would seem another important avenue for future research.

Acknowledgments

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In closing this introductory section we would like to thank our contributors for being so cooperative and efficient in meeting our various requests in terms of timing and space considerations. They have been a wonderful group to work with. We would also like to express a special thanks to the team at Sage in London, particularly to Michael Carmichael and Zoë Elliott, for being so enthusiastic and supportive, and for providing wise practical advice. Finally, because Daan and Michael live on different sides of the globe, we have needed to travel extensively to meet to discuss and plan this project. Without financial support from various research bodies this would have been impossible. We would therefore like to acknowledge the Australian Research Council, the Kurt Lewin Institute, and the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology, for their support over the years of our collaboration.

Daan van Knippenberg
Amsterdam, June 2002
Michael Hogg
Bristol, June 2002

2	Leadership Effectiveness: Functional, Contructivist and Empirical Perspectives

MARTIN M. CHEMERS

Three Dialectics of Group Life

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Naturally occurring groups – not ad hoc laboratory groups with no history and no future working on a task with no meaning; and not questionnaire-based scenarios that exist only in the manipulated imaginations of college sophomores, but real groups – exist for a purpose with meaning and consequences. Any attempt to understand leadership in naturally occurring groups must recognize that reality.

It is the thesis of this chapter that the performance demands placed on naturally occurring groups significantly affect the dynamics of those groups, and that appropriate research and theorizing on leadership and power must recognize the important role of performance in group life.

The purpose, goal, or task of naturally occurring groups usually arises from an environment that is external to the group. But the group also has an internal environment that must be managed in order to ensure that it is capable of dealing with its external purpose. The internal environment makes demands for order, predictability, meaning, inclusion, and identity. The external environment makes demands for attention, flexibility, responsiveness, and effectiveness. The demands of the internal and external environments are not always perfectly compatible. For example, the members of a group might feel most comfortable with a decision-making process that relies heavily on internal conformity to group traditions, even though a complex and fast changing environment requires innovative solutions. The dialectic divergence between internal and external demands creates one of the powerful tensions of group life.

A second dialectic anomaly of group life is that groups, while real entities with a common purpose, are made up of individuals. The individual members of groups bring their own personal, sometimes selfish, goals to group interaction, and those goals may be independent of, or contradictory to, the goals and needs of the group as a collective whole. For example, an individual member of a group might evaluate his/her contributions to the group and the appropriate reward for those contributions in a more positive manner than others might, creating internal conflict that lessens the group’s ability to mobilize its collective resources most effectively. Resolving individual and collective interests is a second tension of group life.

A third distinction can be made between what might be thought of as the relatively objective versus the relatively subjective aspects of group and individual perception and knowledge. Members of a group have perceptions of the group’s competence, status, or some other characteristic that may be more or less accurate. The relative importance of objective accuracy for the group will vary with the conditions of the group’s situation. For example, it might be psychologically rewarding for the group members to evaluate their task-relevant, collective efficacy at an overly positive level. However, the inaccuracy of those perceptions would be very costly if it occurred in a situation that carried significant consequences, such as might be the case if a military unit unexpectedly engaged with a more powerful or better prepared foe.

These three potentially contradictory elements of groups – that they must respond to both internal and external environmental demands; that they must accommodate both individual and collective goals and interests; and that they must negotiate a balance between subjective and objective realities – create a challenge for theories of group effectiveness, leadership, and power. Different theoretical perspectives can be more or less attuned to one or the other pole of the dialectic dimensions of group life, but a complete and ultimately useful theory of leadership and group effectiveness must attend to the full spectrum. I turn now to a discussion of how these three dialectic perspectives play out in the analysis of the basic components of effective leadership.

Three Essential Components of Effective Leadership

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Leadership is a process of social influence in which the leader enlists the talents and efforts of other group members, i.e., followers, in order to accomplish the group’s chosen task. For some groups (e.g., a recreational club), the only goal may be the happiness and satisfaction of group members. Such groups are rare. Most groups exist for the purpose of accomplishing an assigned task.

Leadership success for task-focused groups can best be defined as the level of task performance sustained over the appropriate time period. This definition of success reflects the recognition that factors other than short-term productivity or performance, such as sustained levels of commitment and motivation of group members, are essential to group success in the long run.

Effective leadership has three essential components. First, the would-be leader must induce the other members of the group to regard that person as a credible and legitimate source of influence, i.e., as having a special status and responsibility in the activities of the group. Once a person has gained the legitimacy of leadership status, she or he must develop relationships with followers that motivate and enable them to act to attain collective goals. Finally, the leader must mobilize and direct the efforts of the group to make the most effective use of the combined resources of the group in task accomplishment.

Image management: establishing credibility and earning status

Status is a central concept in the study of leadership. Because leadership is a process of social influence, a potential leader’s first necessity is to gain the credibility and authority to exert influence. Hollander (1958; Hollander and Julian, 1969) established that a leader’s legitimacy flows from the perception that the leader is competent enough to help the group attain its goal and trustworthy enough to remain loyal to collective interests and objectives. The two factors – competency, rooted in the group’s externally oriented goals, and trustworthiness, tied to the internal norms and values of the group – are the bases for judgments about the leader. An examination of the leadership literature reveals that theories about the source of a leader’s influence diverge depending upon which perspective (internal or external) is most prominent.

The work of Lord and his associates (Lord and Maher, 1991; Lord and Smith, 1998; Chapter 5) provides a rich and comprehensive examination of the social-cognitive factors that affect perceptions of leadership. Lord, Foti, and de Vader (1984) established that observers possess implicit theories about what a good leader is and does, and these theories give rise to a set of stereotypical traits and behaviors which leaders are expected to exhibit. Individuals displaying the characteristics appropriate to a particular category of leaders (e.g., military, political, business, religious) are ‘recognized’ as leaders (Lord and Maher, 1991). Effective leaders are aware of this process and seek to present an image consistent with followers’ and other observers’ expectations. It should be noted that the stereotypical characteristics associated with task-focused leadership tend to be those that indicate task or goal relevant competence, such as decisiveness, insight, or coolness under pressure.

Another contributor to judgments of leadership suitability involves observers’ inferences about positive or negative outcomes ostensibly associated with the leader’s actions (Lord and Maher, 1991). Thus, leaders who can take credit for po...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Chapter 1 Identity, Leadership, and Power: Preface and Introduction Daan van Knippenberg and Michael A. Hogg
• Chapter 2 Leadership Effectiveness: Functional, Constructivist and Empirical Perspectives Martin M. Chemers
• Chapter 3 Leader–Member Relations and Social Identity Michael A. Hogg, Robin Martin, and Karen Weeden
• Chapter 4 Leadership as the Outcome of Self-Categorization Processes Michael J. Platow, S. Alexander Haslam, Margaret Foddy, and Diana M. Grace
• Chapter 5 Identity, Leadership Categorization, and Leadership Schema Robert Lord and Rosalie Hall
• Chapter 6 Status Characteristics and Leadership Cecilia L. Ridgeway
• Chapter 7 Few Women at the Top: How Role Incongruity Produces Prejudice and the Glass Ceiling Alice H. Eagly
• Chapter 8 Justice, Identity and Leadership Tom R. Tyler
• Chapter 9 A Relational Perspective on Leadership and Cooperation: Why it Matters to Care and Be Fair David de Cremer
• Chapter 10 Leadership, Identity and Influence: Relational Concerns in the Use of Influence Tactics Barbara van Knippenberg and Daan van Knippenberg
• Chapter 11 Power and Prejudice: A Social–Cognitive Perspective on Power and Leadership Stephanie A. Goodwin
• Chapter 12 Power, Social Categorization, and Social Motives in Negotiation: Implications for Management and Organizational Leadership Carsten K.W. de Dreu & Gerben A. van Kleef
• Chapter 13 Aberrations of Power: Leadership in Totalist Groups Robert S. Baron, Kevin Crawley, and Diana Paulina
• Chapter 14 The Imperatives of Identity: The Role of Identity in Leader Judgment and Decision Making Roderick M. Kramer
• Chapter 15 On the Science of the Art of Leadership Stephen Reicher and Nick Hopkins
• Chapter 16 Identity, Power, and Strategic Social Categorizations: Theorizing the Language of Leadership Scott A. Reid and Sik Hung Ng
• References
• Index