Collective Social Identity and Shared Leadership: Effects of Gender Diversity, Salience and Beliefs

Abstract

Social identity theory suggests that individuals construct their identity not only around personal attributes but based on group membership. Leadership scholars have leveraged this approach by suggesting that when formal leaders are perceived to be similar to their teams, they are more successful. We apply these theoretical perspectives to shared leadership and suggest that collective social identity (the extent to which members view each other as representative of the team) will be an antecedent to the collective granting and claiming of leadership. In addition, we suggest that gender diversity will impact shared leadership via collective social identity. However, we believe that the effect of gender diversity is contingent on both gender salience and gender diversity beliefs. We test our model in a sample of 195 individuals embedded in 55 teams. We largely find empirical support for our hypotheses.