基于互动视角的新任领导者身份构建过程案例研究

A Case Study of New Leaders' Identity Construction Process from an Interaction Perspective

新任领导者常常陷入具备领导者头衔,但下属尚不认可其能力和身份的困境。为了探究他们是如何摆脱困境并构建领导者身份的,本文对王品集团"幼狮计划"中的五位新任领导者进行了案例研究。通过多案例研究方法,我们发现他们刚到组织时面临充满挑战的情境,这激发了他们的心理韧性,进而使他们产生主动行为,而寻求反馈、搭建人际关系网络和搜寻信息这些主动行为又影响着身份构建结果。而且,借助领导者身份构建的互动视角,我们得知下属感知的新任领导者的善意和能力对身份构建结果有影响。综上,我们开发了一个基于互动视角的心理特征对新任领导者身份构建影响机制模型,本文的结论对于揭示新任领导者的管理困难和身份构建策略有理论指导价值。

New leaders from outside organizations are often stuck in all kinds of troubles and challenges after they arrive in the organizations. And the biggest challenge is that even if they have the title of leader,their subordinates don’t recognize their ability and identity,thereby hindering their managerial role.Thus,to achieve the effectiveness of leadership,they need to construct their leader identity.According to previous research on the theme of leader identity construction,on the one hand,they can’t find the mental characteristics that fit in with the environment and challenges that new leaders from outside organizations are confronted with;on the other hand,most of previous studies investigate new leaders’identity construction mechanism from the perspective of new leaders and they ignore the role of the interaction between new leaders and their subordinates.Even if few studies begin paying attention to the interaction between new leaders and their subordinates,the interaction is abstract instead of concrete,a part that must be clarified if we want to investigate how new leaders construct their leader identity.As a result,considering the limitations above,to investigate how new leaders get themselves out of trouble and construct leader identity,we make a case study of five new leaders from Wowprime’s young lion plan.By multiple case study method,we firstly show that they are faced with the challenging environment,including high exterior pressure,high risk,previous problems and anti-acceptance and anti-recognition form their subordinates.And the environment clues motivate their ego-resilience and further the ego-resilience has the influence on the proactive behaviors.Those new leaders who have high ego-resilience have the urgent wish to change the negative environment,so they will take the proactive behaviors positively.Then the three proactive behaviors including feedback seeking,social networking and information seeking have the influences on the results of leader identity construction,which include the promotion time,leadership effectiveness,recognition from the subordinates,and the appraisals from the higher level.Also,based on the interactive perspective of leader identity construction,we know that leaders’benevolence and ability that subordinates perceive also have the influences on the results of leader identity construction.When a subordinate has the perception that the new leader is kind and capable,he will form a good impression of the new leader and project the impression on the proactive behaviors of the new leader,thus producing positive interpretation results and then bringing effective identity construction results.In conclusion,we induce a mechanism model of the influence of leaders’mental characteristics on identity construction from the interaction perspective to show the relationship among ego-resilience,proactive behaviors,perception of benevolence and ability,and the results of leader identity construction.The theoretical innovation is that we choose ego-resilience as the antecedent which is more related with the study context and introduce and quantize the participation of subordinates in the process of new leaders’identity construction.The conclusions above are theoretically valuable to expose the managerial challenges that new leaders are confronted with and investigate the identity construction tactics.At the same time,the research has some limitations.The similarities of new leaders’education background and age are not good for the generalization of the conclusions.We don’t talk with the young lions that have left the organization and future research can emphasize on this part.We ask the young lions and their subordinates to recall the process of new leaders’identity construction process,which may not describe the moment precisely and would result in recall and narrative deviation.Researchers can adopt the tracking investigation to record the whole process of new leaders’identity construction precisely in time so as to get more scientific and precise conclusions.