Abstract
Recent trends in the leadership literature have promoted a social identity approach of leadership that views leadership as the process of representing, advancing, creating, and embedding a sense of shared identity within a group. However, a few empirical studies explore how and when global identity leadership affects team performance at the workplace. To address this lacuna, we used multi-source and two-wave data among 81 teams to explore the role of group-based pride and leader political skill in the association between identity leadership and team performance. The results suggest that identity leadership positively predicts team performance through a mediating role of group-based pride. Furthermore, leader political skill moderates the indirect effect of group-based pride such that the effect is stronger when leader political skill is high rather than low. Finally, several theoretical and practical implications of this study are discussed, and future research directions are also suggested.
Highlights
The essence of leadership is often considered as the process of exerting influence on others (Yukl, 2012)
The current study proposes an integrated moderated mediation model in which group-based pride mediates the influence of identity leadership on team performance, whereas leader political skill moderates the mediation
The hypothesized four-factor model yields a good fit to our data, χ 2 = 99.94, df = 45, p < 0.001, CFI = 0.95, TLI = 0.92, SRMR = 0.03, and RMSEA = 0.07. This model was significantly better than a three-factor model combining leader political skill and team performance ( χ2 = 39.10, df = 1, p < 0.001), a three-factor model combining identity leadership and group-based pride
Summary
The essence of leadership is often considered as the process of exerting influence on others (Yukl, 2012). Leader position is more likely to be considered as a center on the construction and enactment of a shared social identity for group members, which, in turn, promotes group efforts and group-oriented behaviors (Ellemers et al, 2004; Haslam et al, 2020). In line with this claim, researchers propose a social identity approach of leadership that views leadership as the process of representing, advancing, creating, and embedding a sense of shared identity within a group (Hogg, 2001; van Dick and Kerschreiter, 2016; Haslam et al, 2020). Steffens et al (2014) introduced this type of leadership as identity leadership and specified four interrelated dimensions: identity prototypicality, identity advancement, identity impresarioship, and identity entrepreneurship
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