The value of leaders we trust and leaders who make us stronger: Exploring the distinct contributions of different components of identity leadership to group member outcomes

Do leaders who build a sense of shared social identity in their teams thereby protect them from the adverse effects of workplace stress? This is a question that the present paper explores by testing the hypothesis that identity leadership contributes to stronger team identification among employees and, through this, is associated with reduced burnout. We tested this model with unique datasets from the Global Identity Leadership Development (GILD) project with participants from all inhabited continents. We compared two datasets from 2016/2017 (n = 5290; 20 countries) and 2020/2021 (n = 7294; 28 countries) and found very similar levels of identity leadership, team identification and burnout across the five years. An inspection of the 2020/2021 data at the onset of and later in the COVID-19 pandemic showed stable identity leadership levels and slightly higher levels of both burnout and team identification. Supporting our hypotheses, we found almost identical indirect effects (2016/2017, b = −0.132; 2020/2021, b = −0.133) across the five-year span in both datasets. Using a subset of n = 111 German participants surveyed over two waves, we found the indirect effect confirmed over time with identity leadership (at T1) predicting team identification and, in turn, burnout, three months later. Finally, we explored whether there could be a “too-much-of-a-good-thing” effect for identity leadership. Speaking against this, we found a u-shaped quadratic effect whereby ratings of identity leadership at the upper end of the distribution were related to even stronger team identification and a stronger indirect effect on reduced burnout.

Recent theorizing applying the social identity approach to leadership proposes a four‐dimensional model of identity leadership that centres on leaders’ management of a shared sense of ‘we’ and ‘us’. This research validates a scale assessing this model – the Identity Leadership Inventory ( ILI ). We present results from an international project with data from all six continents and from more than 20 countries/regions with 5,290 participants. The ILI was translated (using back‐translation methods) into 13 different languages (available in the Appendix ) and used along with measures of other leadership constructs (i.e., leader–member exchange [ LMX ], transformational leadership, and authentic leadership) as well as employee attitudes and (self‐reported) behaviours – namely identification, trust in the leader, job satisfaction, innovative work behaviour, organizational citizenship behaviour, and burnout. Results provide consistent support for the construct, discriminant, and criterion validity of the ILI across countries. We show that the four dimensions of identity leadership are distinguishable and that they relate to important work‐related attitudes and behaviours above and beyond other leadership constructs. Finally, we also validate a short form of the ILI , noting that is likely to have particular utility in applied contexts. Practitioner points The Identity Leadership Inventory ( ILI ) has a consistent factor structure and high predictive value across 20 countries and can thus be used to assess a leader's ability to manage (team and organizational) identities in a range of national and cultural contexts. Identity leadership as perceived by employees is uniquely related to important indicators of leadership effectiveness including employees’ relationship to their team (identification and perceived team support), well‐being (job satisfaction and reduced burnout), and performance (citizenship and innovative behaviour at work). The ILI can be used in practical settings to assess and develop leadership, for instance, in 360‐degree feedback systems. The short form of the ILI is also a valid assessment of identity leadership, and this is likely to be useful in a range of applied contexts (e.g., those where there is a premium on cost and time or when comparing multiple leaders or multiple time points).

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to examine how team identification influences employee work behaviors within organizational contexts. Specifically, we investigate the impact of team identification on two distinct behaviors: organizational citizenship behavior toward individuals (OCB-I) and counterproductive work behavior toward Individuals (CWB-I), with knowledge sharing as a mediating mechanism. By examining these relationships, this study provides insights into how team identification shapes both positive and negative employee behaviors and how knowledge sharing functions as a crucial mechanism in this process.Design/methodology/approachA two-wave, time-lagged survey design was employed. Data were collected from 269 full-time employees across various industries in South Korea, with participants providing follow-up responses one week after the initial survey.FindingsThe study’s findings revealed that team identification significantly influences employee work behaviors. A strong sense of team identification was positively associated with organizational citizenship behavior toward individuals (OCB-I). Although not statistically significant, team identification also showed a tendency to negatively impact Counterproductive Work Behavior toward Individuals (CWB-I). Importantly, knowledge sharing mediated both relationships. Specifically, knowledge sharing partially mediated the positive relationship between team identification and OCB-I while mediating the negative relationship between team identification and CWB-I. These results highlight the crucial role of knowledge sharing in translating team identification into observable workplace behaviors.Originality/valueThis study contributes original insights to the organizational behavior field by elucidating the mediating role of knowledge sharing in the relationship between team identification and employee work behaviors. While previous research has examined these elements separately, our study uniquely integrates them, demonstrating how knowledge sharing serves as a pivotal mechanism translating team identification into both positive (OCB-I) and negative (CWB-I) work behaviors. The findings provide a nuanced understanding of team dynamics within organizations and underscore the importance of fostering strong team identities and knowledge-sharing cultures. This research offers valuable implications for both theory and practice in organizational development and management.

The study examines how leadership practices mediate the relationship between organizational values and organizational citizenship behavior among public school teachers. The research used a quantitative design and gathered data from 400 public school teachers through a validated questionnaire. The results indicated a high level of organizational values, organizational citizenship behavior, and leadership practices among the participants. Significant relationships were found between organizational values and organizational citizenship behavior, organizational values and leadership practices, and leadership practices and organizational citizenship behavior. Regression analysis revealed that specific domains of organizational values (economic, professional, aesthetic, and physical) and leadership practices (modeling the way, inspiring a shared vision, challenging the process, and enabling others to act) significantly influenced organizational citizenship behavior. Path analysis also confirmed that leadership practices do not mediate the relationship between organizational values and citizenship behavior. This study underscores the importance of nurturing organizational values and effective leadership practices to enhance teachers’ organizational citizenship behavior, thus contributing to the overall effectiveness of educational institutions.

Background/problem: In contemporary Chinese university management, fostering knowledge sharing is critical for achieving collaboration against reduced human resources. While leadership as an antecedent to facilitate knowledge sharing has been extensively studied, identity leadership has not yet been addressed. Objective/purpose: The study aimed to examine the mediating role of team identification between identity leadership and knowledge sharing behaviors. It also proposed to investigate the effect of team identification on ingroup bias and the potential influence on knowledge sharing. Design and Methodology: This quantitative study collected the data from 385 administrative staff members of Chinese universities using quota sampling. Data was analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM). Results: The findings revealed a positive effect of identity leadership on team identification (β = .65, p < .001), of team identification on knowledge sharing behaviors (β = .38, p < .001), and on ingroup bias (β = .39, p < .001). Team identification mediated the effect of identity leadership and knowledge sharing behaviors (β = .23, p < .001), while the ingroup bias failed to show positive mediation between team identification and knowledge sharing behaviors (β = -.02, p = .34). Conclusion and Implications: The study highlights the role of identification on knowledge sharing and ingroup bias. The findings indicate that while advancement of team identification by engaging identity leadership benefits ingroup knowledge sharing, ingroup bias that has been introduced with overly strong identification should be balanced. It reflects the attitudinal degrading towards the outgroup but failed to promote knowledge sharing among the ingroup.

PurposeThe purpose of the present research was to examine the impact of identity leadership on employees' well-being mediated by team identification and trust in the leader.Design/methodology/approachIn study 1, N = 192 employees participated in a cross-sectional online survey measuring identity leadership, team identification, trust in the leader and well-being (i.e., job satisfaction, work engagement, burnout). In study 2, N = 72 university students participated in a vignette study that manipulated high/low identity leadership and tested its effect on team identification and trust in the leader.FindingsIn study 1, identity leadership predicted higher team identification, trust in the leader and well-being of employees. Team identification mediated the positive relationship of identity leadership with both job satisfaction and work engagement, while trust in the leader mediated the negative relationship of identity leadership with burnout. In study 2, team identification and trust in the leader were significantly higher in the high identity leadership condition.Research limitations/implicationsThe findings are consistent with the few existing studies on the positive effects of identity leadership. However, due to the correlational nature of the data in study 1, future longitudinal field research is needed to support the current findings and further establish causality for the model as a whole.Practical implicationsIdentity leadership seems to be promising to increase well-being among employees. Thus, leadership development programs to foster identity leadership and collective identity should be implemented in organizations and further tested with respect to well-being.Originality/valueThis research contributes to an emerging body of research on the social identity approach to leadership and supports the recent claims that social identity might be one of the links between leader behavior and well-being of employees. Moreover, this study is among the first to investigate and experimentally test the underlying mechanisms of identity leadership.

The present study aimed at designing and testing a model of servant leadership consequences. It has selected the servant leadership structure as an antecedent variable, the job satisfaction, organizational commitment and organizational citizenship behavior structures as the consequent variables, and the perceived organizational support and leader-member exchange structures as the mediator variables. The research method was descriptive correlational. Therefore, a total of 230 employees from an industrial company were selected through simple random sampling. The research tools included the servant leadership, perceived organizational support, leader-member exchange, job satisfaction, organizational commitment and organizational citizenship behavior questionnaires. The data was analyzed through structural equation modeling (SEM) and mediator analysis. The analysis of structural equation modeling supported the proposed model fit with data.The results indicated a direct positive effect of servant leadership on all dependent variables in the model, and a direct positive effect of perceived organizational support on job satisfaction, organizational commitment and organizational citizenship behavior, and a positive indirect effect of servant leadership on job satisfaction, organizational commitment and organizational citizenship behavior through perceived organizational support and leader-member exchange.

ObjectivesThe present research investigates how coaches' identity leadership predicts individual and team outcomes in soccer. Specifically, we tested hypotheses that coaches' identity leadership would be associated with players' perceptions of (a) higher team effort, (b) lower turnover intentions, (c) better individual performance, and (d) better team performance. In addition, we aimed to examine the relationship between coaches' identity leadership and increased team identification of players and the degree to which the associations of identity leadership with these various outcomes were mediated by players' strength of team identification. DesignWe conducted a cross-sectional study of male soccer players in Germany. MethodThe final sample consisted of 247 male soccer players nested in 24 teams that completed measures of their coaches' identity leadership, team identification, team effort, turnover intentions, and individual/team performance. ResultsAnalysis revealed a positive relationship between coaches' identity leadership and team effort, as well as individual and team performance. Moreover, coaches' identity leadership was associated with lower turnover intentions. There was also evidence that the relationships between identity leadership and the investigated outcomes were mediated by team identification. ConclusionsThese findings support claims that coaches' identity leadership is associated with better individual and team outcomes because it helps to build a sense of ‘we’ and ‘us’ in the team they lead.

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Leaders are really important to a team or an organization, because they play key roles for guiding the team members or employees' behavior. In this article we consider that ethical leadership influences organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) at different levels. Drawing on social identity theory (SIT) we argue “identification with team leader” as a mediator from ethical leadership to group-level OCB and individual-level OCB. Meanwhile we theorize and propose the bottom-up process linking individual-level OCB to group-level OCB through another mediator - Team Identification. We argue that individual-level OCB in a team is positively related to group-level OCB via team identification. In the end, we discuss implications and limitations of our arguments for theory and practices.

Employees’ identifications are a valuable asset for modern organizations, and identification research has stressed the necessity to distinguish identifications according to their focus (i.e. organizational, team, or leader identification). Interestingly, transformational leadership (TFL) has been proposed to unfold its effects by transforming followers’ identifications and could thus be a powerful way to actively manage identification. However, it remains unclear whether TFL affects identifications with different foci similarly or whether it predominantly influences a specific focus. To resolve this puzzle, the authors conducted a meta‐analysis (k = 73; N = 20,543) and found that TFL (and each TFL sub‐dimension) is more strongly associated with leader identification than with organizational identification or team identification. By presenting a comprehensive model of TFL's effects on identifications, we show that leader identification mediates the relationships between TFL and collective identifications (i.e. organizational identification or team identification), illustrating that relational identification plays a crucial role in subsequently shaping collective identifications. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

PurposeThe study aimed to test the validity and reliability of the Polish version of the identity leadership inventory (ILI) proposed by Steffens, Haslam, Reicher et al. (2014) and to confirm the relationship between identity leadership and various job-related outcomes (i.e., trust in leaders, job satisfaction, work engagement and turnover intentions) among employees from Poland-based organizations. Identity leadership appears to be a universal construct (van Dick, Ciampa, & Liang, 2018) but no one has studied it in Poland so far.Design/methodology/approachThe sample consisted of 1078 employees collected in two independent subsamples from different organizations located in Northern and Central Poland. We evaluated the ILI’s factorial structure using confirmatory factor analysis.FindingsThe results confirm that the 15-item Polish version of the ILI has a four-dimensional structure with factors representing prototypicality, advancement, entrepreneurship and impresarioship. It showed satisfactory reliability. The identity leadership inventory-short form (four items) also showed a good fit with the data. As expected, the relationships between identity leadership and important work-related outcomes (general level of job satisfaction, work engagement, trust toward the leader and turnover intentions) were also significant.Originality/valueDespite the cultural specifics of Polish organizations, the research results were generally very similar to those in other countries, confirming the universality of the ILI as shown in the Global Identity Leadership Development project (GILD, see van Dick, Ciampa, & Liang, 2018; van Dick et al., 2021).

The social identity approach has become an important framework for understanding effective leadership. The present study is the first to longitudinally examine the relative impact of coaches’ and athlete leaders’ identity leadership on athletes’ identification with their team, as well as the subsequent relationships with key team and individual outcomes. To investigate these research questions, 18 sport teams (N = 279) completed a questionnaire early and late in their season competition. To analyse these data, we conducted structural equation modelling and controlled both for baseline values and the nested structure of our data. Results revealed that it was mainly the identity leadership of athlete leaders (and not of the coach) early in the season that predicted athletes’ team identification later in the season. This increased team identification in turn fed into both team outcomes (i.e., task climate, team resilience, team performance) and individual outcomes (i.e., well-being, burnout, and individual performance). The mediating role of team identification suggests that by building a shared sense of ‘we’, athlete leaders can improve the team’s effectiveness and enhance athletes’ well-being. Accordingly, we conclude that empowering athlete leaders and strengthening their identity leadership skills is an important way to unlock sport teams’ full potential.

In the past two decades, scholars have increasingly studied the concepts of social identity leadership and shared leadership, but there is very little research combining these approaches. Given the potential that shared leadership could strengthen identity leadership, this study aimed to explore how organisational identity might be collectively actualised in a self-managing organisation, where decision-making authority was radically decentralised. The multisource data included five interviews with vertical leaders and HR, three focus groups with employees, four recordings of monthly company review meetings, and a culture booklet, analysed applying theory-informed thematic analysis. The findings suggest that vertical leaders’ identity leadership is critical in facilitating successful shared identity leadership. Additionally, the results provide new evidence of peer-leader roles that are important particularly in fostering employee identification. Peer-leaders’ identity entrepreneurship and advancement during socialisation created an opportunity to form an authentic and better aligned team. Additionally, their shared impresarioship with vertical leaders integrated the identity into organisational practices and policies. The results indicate that shared identity leadership may critically strengthen its effectiveness. Future research should explore whether the results apply more widely. The findings suggest that team leaders should work with employees to integrate organisational identity across their practices, and policies. MAD Statement Our study explored how more effective social identity leadership might be achieved if vertical leaders collaborated with employees in identity actualisation. Our results suggest that shared identity leadership has a great potential to enhance the achievement of identity-reflecting outcomes such as in this case, organisational growth and innovation, and also employee identification. The first two seemed to result particularly from the vertical leaders’ active identity leadership, which created an organisational environment fostering shared decision-making and supportive of employee-led innovations. Instead, the peer-leaders’ identity leadership was instrumental in promoting identification and setting shared expectations for work; thus, promoting productive collaboration.

Background and Aim: Considering the relationship between leadership behaviors and organizational citizenship behaviors in previous researchs, this study aimed to determine the relationship between transformational leadership with organizational citizenship behaviors with mediating role of ethical climate and job attitudes. Materials and Methods: This was a descriptive-correlational study. The study population consisted of 192 elementary school teachers of Sanandaj city in the academic year 2018-19. Sample size was estimated using Morgan table and available sampling method was used. Bass & Avolio ’ s Transformational leadership (1997), Victor & Cullen ’ s Ethical climate (1998), Ackfelt & Coote ’ s Job attitudes (2005) and Organ ’ s Organizational citizenship behavior (1988) questionnaires were used to collect data. To analyze the data correlation test and Structural equation modeling was used. Findings: There was a significant correlation between the research variables (p<0.01). The effect of transformational leadership on positive ethical climate (β=0.63 , t=4.70), and job attitudes (β=0.48 , t=3.74) was significant. Also, the effect of ethical climate on job attitudes (β=0.65 , t=3.34) and organizational citizenship behaviors (β=0.85 , t=3.28) and effect of job attitudes on organizational citizenship behaviors was approved (β=0.44 , t=3.49). Overall, the model was well-fitted (X2/df=2.21). Conclusion: Based on the findings, positive ethical climate and job attitudes play mediating role in the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational citizenship behaviors. Therefore, efforts to improve ethical climate and teachers' professional attitudes of the schools are recommended. Please cite this article as: Zandi KH, Fatahi M, Faghirnezhad F, Nasiri FS. The Relationship between Transformational Leadership and Organizational Citizenship Behaviors with Mediating Role of Positive Ethical Climate and Job Attitudes. Bioethics Journal 2019; 9(31): 73-83.