After many years of decline, leadership has once again attracted the attention of social psychologists. This new interest has been spurred by conceptual advances in social cognition and social identity, and by growing synergies between social cognition, social identity, and organizational psychology. Scholars have become concerned that current leadership theories, largely in organizational psychology, are inadequately grounded in an analysis of the generative role of psychological group membership. The social identity analysis of leadership described in this chapter goes some way toward addressing this concern. The social identity perspective views group and intergroup phenomena (perceptions, attitudes, feelings, and behaviors) as being generated by a process in which people categorize and depersonalize themselves and others in terms of the relevant ingroup or outgroup prototype. Prototypes describe and prescribe all group-defining attributes (perceptions, attitudes, feelings, and behaviors) and thus provide people with social identities. They are formed and modified according to the metacontrast principle to maximize the subjective entitativity of groups. Social identity processes are motivated by a need to reduce uncertainty about self, others, and one's relations with others. They are also motivated by self-enhancement that underpins a struggle to protect or enhance the evaluatively positive distinctiveness of one's own group relative to other groups. Both these motives are played out against a backdrop of beliefs about the nature of intergroup relations, and thus about the sorts of strategies that can realistically be adopted to reduce uncertainty and to protect{plus 45 degree rule}enhance the evaluative self-concept. Applied to leadership, the social identity perspective focuses on the critical role of prototypicality in salient groups. Within low salience groups-loose aggregates of people who do not identify very strongly-leadership effectiveness probably rests on matching the appropriate leadership schema and on developing favorable interpersonal leader-member exchange relations. Things are different in more salient groups-groups that are subjectively important and with which members identify strongly. Attention and information processing are focused on prototypicality and on how prototypical members are. Leadership effectiveness rests firmly on the extent to which the leader appears to match the group prototype and thus to embody the group attributes to which followers aspire and conform. Social attraction processes ensure that prototypical leaders are unilaterally and consensually socially liked-they are popular, in group terms, and thus able to actively influence others and to be innovative within the broad parameters of the group's prototype. Social attraction also instantiates a status and prestige differential between leader(s) and followers. Attribution processes, specifically the fundamental attribution error, correspondence bias, or essentialism, operate to construct a charismatic and leadership persona for the prototypical leader. This happens because followers pay close attention to prototypicality, and thus prototypical leaders are figural against the background of less prototypical members. One consequence is that the leader acquires greater and more secure leadership ability. Another consequence is that the status and prestige differential between leader(s) and followers is entrenched. In this chapter we described the social identity analysis of leadership in some detail, including a description of the ways that prototypical leaders can protect their tenure through manipulation and control of the group's prototype. We also occupied considerable space describing key empirical tests of the analysis-these tests necessarily hinge on a demonstration that leadership processes become more prototype based with increasing group salience. There are now many direct and indirect tests from a number of laboratories and research groups around the world that provide support for the social identity analysis described here. We described the results of about 25 independent samples from 16 different studies in some detail. Overall, these studies show that contingent on social identity salience and group identification, leader prototypicality is positively related to leadership effectiveness, as are proxies of prototypicality such as the group membership of the leader and the leader selection procedure. Similarly, group-oriented attitudes and behaviors, like leader commitment to the group and leader self-sacrifice for the group, are positively related to leader effectiveness in salient groups. This latter relationship, however, primarily occurs for less prototypical leaders-more prototypical leaders tend to be relatively effective irrespective of the group orientation of their behavior. In contrast to leader prototypicality, which grows in importance as group membership becomes more salient, more personalized attributes of the leader and interpersonal aspects of the leader's behavior, such as leader schema congruence and the quality of the interpersonal leader-follower relationship, diminish in importance as group membership becomes more salient. There is, therefore, good support for the core propositions of the social identity analysis of leadership as outlined in this chapter. What remains to be tested more extensively is the role of attribution processes, and to a lesser extent the role of social attraction. The social identity analysis of leadership may provide important qualifications and extensions of some major contemporary perspectives on leadership. For example, there is some support for the social identity proposition that prototypicality is a basis of charisma, and that leader behaviors that are typically associated with charismatic leadership, such as invoking collective interest, are less important determinants of charisma for prototypical than for less prototypical leaders. There is also some evidence that interpersonal leader-member exchange (LMX) relationships may diminish in importance whereas depersonalized prototype-based relationships increase in importance as a function of increasing group salience. These findings are a significant step toward integration of the social identity analysis of leadership with contemporary organizational psychological theories of charismatic and transformational leadership, and of leader-member exchange processes (LMX theory). The social identity analysis of leadership has great potential to reconceptualize a range of leadership phenomena and leadership contexts. To illustrate this, we identified three possible directions: the glass ceiling effect, leadership maintenance processes in relationship to threats to the prototypicality of leaders (i.e., changes in group prototypes, and the differentiation between leader and group), and the role of leadership in social and organizational change. There is much work yet to be done, but this work can be grounded in strong empirical support for the core propositions of the social identity analysis of leadership. In conclusion, the social identity analysis of leadership views leadership as a group process that arises from the social categorization and depersonalization processes associated with social identity. Prototype-based depersonalization and the behavior of followers in salient groups play a critical role. They empower individuals as leaders, imbue them with charisma, create a status differential between leader(s) and followers that has some of the typical characteristics of uneven status intergroup relations, and set up conditions that are conducive to coercion and the exercise of power. These ideas are a rich source of conceptual explorations, and basic and applied empirical research into social identity and leadership. They help regain the study of leadership for social psychology. © 2003 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.
