Constructing a Leader Identity: A Video Study of Teams in Interaction

Abstract

Many leadership researchers now conceptualize leadership as a process of mutual social influence which is bound neither by formal roles nor hierarchy structures. This framing of leadership as inherently social and multi-directional in nature provides rich possibilities for new ways of understanding the interactional and relational processes which in turn lead to the construction of leader and follower identities. This qualitative study attempts to investigate the leader identity construction process through the use of video data. Teams of young adults engaged in an entrepreneurship program were video recorded during their team meetings in order to analyze the leader and follower identity construction process as it took place in real time. Leadership Identity Construction Theory was utilized as the theoretical lens with which to interpret the leader identity construction process, while interaction analysis was used to analyze the video data. Findings suggest that followers play critical roles in the leader identity construction process both as sources of support for leader identity construction as well as acting as challengers to this process. The findings also bring critical new insights regarding how individuals might resist unwanted identities. The paper also outlines how individuals make use of multimodal resources in the construction of their leader identity.