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Abstract:

The social identity approach to leadership has had increasing impact in recent years. Many studies have shown, for instance, that more prototypical leaders are more effective — for example, they are typically trusted more, secure more follower support and have greater leeway to make decisions. More recently, in addition to identity prototypicality (or “being one of us“), three further dimensions of identity leadership have been identified (Haslam, Reicher & Platow, 2011): identity advancement (“doing it for us“), identity entrepreneurship (“crafting a sense of us“) and identity impressarioship (“making us matter“). All four dimensions have recently been operationalized with the Identity Leadership Inventory (ILI; Steffens et al., 2014). The present presentation introduces and presents first results of an ongoing international project, the ILI-Global, which applies and validates the ILI scales by gathering data from all six continents and more than 20 countries with over 3800 participants. The ILI has been translated (using back-translation methods) and used in online surveys along with other measures of leadership (LMX, transformational and authentic leadership) and employee attitudes and (self-reported) behaviors (e.g., satisfaction, identification, citizenship behaviors) in 15 different languages. The results of ILI-Global confirm the validity of the ILI across cultures. We show that the four dimensions of the ILI are distinguishable and that they contribute to the prediction of work-related attitudes and behaviors above and beyond other influential leadership constructs. Cultural influences will also be discussed.