Social Identity Theory of Leadership

Leadership is a core feature of groups and ranges from leaders of small teams through corporate chief executive officers (CEOs) to national and global leaders who stride the world stage. It is difficult to imagine groups that do not have some form of leadership. Leaders coordinate and motivate the actions of group members to achieve group goals, but they also set the goals and provide an overall vision for the group.

Most leadership research is conducted outside social psychology, in the organizational sciences, and focuses principally on organizational leadership and the psychology of the CEO. One feature of leadership that has been underemphasized by this literature is its identity function: Leaders define what a group stands for and thus the identity of the group's members. We look to our leaders to define who we are and thus what we should think, how we should behave, how we should view the world, and how others are likely to view us. The social identity theory of leadership, originally published by Michael Hogg in 2001 and further developed by Michael Hogg and Daan van Knippenberg in 2003, draws on social identity theory to provide an identity-focused analysis of leadership.

This entry describes the components of the social identity theory of leadership in the context of its grounding in aspects of social identity theory and self-categorization theory. When people identify relatively strongly with a group, social identity processes come into play to make leaders more effective if they are perceived by the group to be a good fit with the group's norms and identity. Such leaders are influential and “popular”; are perceived to have relatively high status; are imbued with legitimacy, trust, and charisma; are allowed to be innovative and transformative; are effective entrepreneurs of identity; and are effective at integrating different subgroups and identities.