Leadership is among the most complicated yet crucial concepts in modern times. Both leadership and followership are evolving, so is the available research and commentary about them. There has been a remarkable shift in the learning of organization from a focus on management and systems to a focus on people, teams, and leadership. Conversely, the landscape in the workplace is evolving as the millennials gradually become the majority in the workplace (Sweeney et al., 2019). These changes have also created new forms of research and volumes of commentary. Among the new areas of research relates to social identity and its implications on leadership. Despite the buildup in theory and techniques about how to run organizations, the success or failure in leadership stems from practical application. It is not about what the leader knows but rather the results of the application of leadership skills. With organizations being social structures, social identity, and implications are essential to whether leadership results in success or failure.
The Contribution of Social Sciences Research in Operationalizing “Leadership.”
According to Haslam (2013), leadership is all about social identity and the ability of the leader to unite followers towards a singular purpose. Professor Haslam argues that leadership is more about followers than it is about a leader. For example, Louis VI of France lost both his position and his head for pushing the notion that France was all about himself. On the other hand, John F Kennedy focused on America rather than himself, hence his greatness as president. Followers need to believe that the leader has their interests at heart and is focused on the collective. Such leadership creates an element of social identity which motivates followers to work together and thrive as a group.
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The ideas by Haslam, as reflected in his video, also feature in the article Steffens et al. (2014), which Haslam is a co-author. The article argues that most leadership literature focuses on the expected end of oneness in the team without addressing the process. First, the followers need to believe that the leader is one of them, based on how the leader presents. Secondly, the leader should be able to convince the team that leadership actions and decisions are in the best interest of the team. Thirdly, leaders need identity entrepreneurship skills, which are the ability to come up with a vision of what the team ought to become. Finally, the leader needs the skills and charisma to undertake identity impresarios, which is embedding the vision into the minds of the followers. These skills give a team and its leader a singular social identity that enables the team to work as one.
Gaps in the Existing Literature
The diagram and instructions above are only a blueprint whose implementation depends on the internal and external environment of each peculiar team. Anderson et al. (2017) warn that there is a generational issue associated with leadership and the relationship between the leaders and followers. For example, most of the current literature and research stems from an organizational setting with a millennial minority yet current, and future trends reflect millennia majority, later replaced by other generations. Leaders will need to understand and recalibrate their leadership techniques to suit changes in followership. Further, the new generations are also taking over positions of leadership, a fact that will demand a recalibration of how leaders establish social identity in organizations and teams.
From a different perspective, Batistič et al. (2017) address the need for combining the leadership perspectives of social identity with the management components of running an organization. The article addresses the three levels of management, the micro, meso, and macro levels. Social identity and its inferences in leadership can canvass the micro-level that regards the individual and the meso-level that regards the team.
However, the macro-level, which regards the organization, will require a focus on systems, which is a management component. Modern organizations are exponentially vast to the extent that they lack precedent. Professor Haslam includes nations and corporations in his definition of organizations. Currently, nations such as China and India have over a billion people, while others like America have over 50 smaller distinct and slightly autonomous units. On the corporate scene, companies such as Facebook, Walmart, Toyota, and Microsoft, and Apple have hundreds of thousands of employees and millions of people indirectly operating under each of them. This multi-level scenario begs the question of how a leader can create oneness on such a vast stage (Sweeney et al., 2019). Secondly, there is the issue of the effects of creating a solid social identity, then leading the organization in the wrong direction, as happened to individuals such as Hitler.
Conclusion and Solution
The research and analysis above present two significant issues. First, there is evidence that social identity is essential for organizational success. For organizations to succeed, they need optimum inferences from people. For the people to make the best effort, they need engagement and motivation, which social identity can procure. However, an evolving internal and external organizational environment convolutes the process of creating a social identity. Further, having social identity does not guarantee good results and may even produce negative results based on the organizational systems. The solution to these issues is targeted research, including ethnography and case studies. Ethnography will provide essential insights on current leadership practices to provide inferences for the future. On the other hand, comprehensive case studies will provide valuable lessons from the past. These inferences will enable the development of mechanisms on how to overcome challenges relating to the implementation of social leadership in modern and future organizations.
References
Anderson, H. J., Baur, J. E., Griffith, J. A., & Buckley, M. R. (2017). What works for you may not work for (Gen) Me: Limitations of present leadership theories for the new generation. The Leadership Quarterly , 28 (1), 245-260.
Batistič, S., Černe, M., & Vogel, B. (2017). Just how multi-level is leadership research? A document co-citation analysis 1980–2013 on leadership constructs and outcomes. The Leadership Quarterly , 28 (1), 86-103.
Haslam, A. (2013). The new psychology of leadership: Why and how leaders need to care about group identity. CIFAR . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwcf_E9pUUA
Steffens, N. K., Haslam, S. A., Reicher, S. D., Platow, M. J., Fransen, K., Yang, J., ... & Boen, F. (2014). Leadership as social identity management: Introducing the Identity Leadership Inventory (ILI) to assess and validate a four-dimensional model. The leadership quarterly , 25 (5), 1001-1024.
Sweeney, A., Clarke, N., & Higgs, M. (2019). Shared leadership in commercial organizations: A systematic review of definitions, theoretical frameworks and organizational outcomes. International Journal of Management Reviews , 21 (1), 115-136.
