The Social Identity Approach to Effective Leadership： An Overview and Some Ideas on Cross-Cultural Generalizability

When employees identify with the groups and organizations they work for, this typically has positive implications for work-related attitudes and behaviors. The present paper provides a focused overview of the social identity approach to leadership and some ideas on its cross-cultural generalizability. To this end, we will first outline the basic tenets of the social identity approach and summarize the relations of organizational identification with work-related variables. Then, we will discuss the role of social identity-related concepts for effective leadership. In particular, we will present empirical studies on the following three aspects： （1） the transfer of leader identification onto their followers, （2） the role of leader prototypicality, and （3） the ways for leaders to actively manage the identities of the groups they lead. Finally, we will provide some suggestions on how to implement the principles of identity management into practice and offer suggestions for future research, with a special focus on China.

Using Twitter Bios to Measure Changes in Self-Identity:Are Americans Defining Themselves More Politically Over Time?

Are Americans weaving their political views more tightly into the fabric of their self-identity over time?If so,then we might expect partisan disagreements to continue becoming more emotional,tribal,and intractable.Much recent scholarship has speculated that this politicization of Americans’identity is occurring,but there has been little compelling attempt to quantify the phenomenon,largely because the concept of identity is notoriously difficult to measure.We introduce here a methodology,Longitudinal Online Profile Sampling(LOPS),which affords quantifiable insights into the way individuals amend their identity over time.Using this method,we analyze millions of“bios”on the microblogging site Twitter over a 4-year span,and conclude that the average American user is increasingly integrating politics into their social identity.Americans on the site are adding political words to their bios at a higher rate than any other category of words we measured,and are now more likely to describe themselves by their political affiliation than their religious affiliation.The data suggest that this is due to both cohort and individual-level effects.

Workplace Marginalization： In the Group but Out of the Loop

Abstract New-entry employees expect to be involved rather than to be marginalized. This paper proposes a model to examine the process through which employees can be exempt from marginalization in their organization as a ＂political arena.＂ We argue that an employee, in order not to be marginalized, would like to perform high-quality in-role and extra-role behaviors and also develop good guanxi with his/her immediate supervisor. Moreover, the effects of employee efforts and guanxi on workplace marginalization are moderated by the organization political climate. Two studies were performed to examine the hypothesized model. The pilot study employed a sample of civil servants to develop and validate the measurement of workplace marginalization. The main study collected matched data from 343 employees, 662 of their colleagues, and 343 immediate supervisors. Results of hierarchical linear modeling analysis show that employee job performance, organizational citizenship behavior, and supervisor-subordinate guanxi are negatively related to workplace marginalization. In addition, the negative relationship between guanxi and workplace marginalization is stronger in firms with less organizational politics than those with intensive politics.