Intergroup Leadership: The Challenge of Successfully Leading Fractured Groups and Societies

Abstract

Leadership often involves providing leadership to a group that is structured into separate subgroups that have distinctive self-contained identities that are cherished by their members. In this respect, leadership can be characterized as intergroup leadership. The challenge of intergroup leadership is to forge a superordinate identity that does not erase or blur the subgroups’ identity boundaries and create a threat to the subgroups’ social identity distinctiveness, as such identity threat can provoke intersubgroup conflict that fragments the superordinate group. According to intergroup-leadership theory, successful intergroup leaders need to construct, promote, and exemplify an intergroup relational identity that preserves subgroups’ distinctiveness and celebrates that distinctiveness and intersubgroup cooperation as fundamental aspects of subgroup and superordinate-group identity. In this article, we describe intergroup-leadership theory (which applies to groups of all sizes and complexions), summarize empirical support for its main tenets, and outline extensions and future directions.