The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say “I”. And that’s not because they have trained themselves not to say “I”. They don’t think “I”. They think “team”. They understand their job to be to make the team function.… There is an identification (very often quite unconsciously) with the task and with the group.
(Drucker, 1992, p. 14)
The title of this book, The New Psychology of Leadership, raises three questions. What do we mean by leadership? What do we mean by the psychology of leadership? And what is new about our approach to the psychology of leadership? It is best to be clear about these matters before we start on the body of the book.
Leadership, for us, is not simply about getting people to do things. It is about getting them to want to do things. Leadership, then, is about shaping beliefs, desires, and priorities. It is about achieving influence, not securing compliance. Leadership therefore needs to be distinguished from such things as management, decision-making, and authority. These are all important and they are all implicated in the leadership process. But, from our definition, good leadership is not determined by competent management, skilled decision-making, or accepted authority in and of themselves. The key reason for this is that these things do not necessarily involve winning the hearts and minds of others or harnessing their energies and passions. Leadership always does.
Even more, leadership is not about brute force, raw power, or “incentivization.” Indeed we suggest that such things are indicators and consequences of the failure of leadership. True, they can be used to affect the behavior of others. If you threaten dire punishment for disobedience and then instruct others to march off towards a particular destination, they will probably do so. Equally, if you offer them great inducements for obedience, they will probably do the same. But in either of these cases it is most unlikely that they will be truly influenced in the sense that they come to see the mission as their own. If anything, the opposite will be true. That is, they are likely to reject the imposed mission precisely because they see it as externally imposed. So, take away the stick—or the carrot—and people are liable to stop marching, or even to march off in the opposite direction in order to assert their independence. Not only do you have to expend considerable resources in order to secure compliance, but, over time, you have to devote ever-increasing resources in order to maintain that compliance.
In contrast, if one can inspire people to want to travel in a given direction, then they will continue to act even in the absence of the leader. If one is seen as articulating what people want to do, then each act of persuasion increases the credibility of the leader and makes future persuasion both more likely and easier to achieve. In other words, instead of being self-depleting, true leadership is self-regenerating. And it is this remarkable—almost alchemic— quality that makes the topic of leadership so fascinating and so important.
If leadership centers on the process of influence—if, in the words of Robert Cialdini, it is about “getting things done through others” (2001, p. 72)—then, in order to understand it, we need to focus on the mental states and processes that lead people to listen to leaders, to heed what they have to say, and to take on the vision of the leader as their own. It is important to stress, however, that our emphasis does not reflect a reductionist belief that leadership is an entirely psychological phenomenon that can be explained by psychology alone. On the contrary, our approach is situated within a tradition that argues that the operation of psychological processes always depends upon social context (Israel & Tajfel, 1972). This means, on the one hand, that psychologists must always pay attention to the nature of society. On the other, it means that psychology helps identify which features of society will impact most strongly on what people think or do. Put slightly differently, what good psychology does is to tell us what to look for in our social world. It most definitely does not provide a pretext for ignoring the world and looking only inside the head.
In the case of leadership, there are a range of social and contextual factors that impact upon a leader’s capacity to influence others. Most importantly perhaps, these include (a) the culture of the group that is being led, as well as that of the broader society within which that group is located, (b) the nature of the institutions within which leadership takes place (e.g., whether, to use Aristotle’s taxonomy, those institutions are democracies, aristocracies, or monarchies), and (c) the gender of leaders themselves. All of these factors are important in their own right. At various points in the analysis, we will also demonstrate how they impinge on the influence process. Nevertheless, our primary focus remains on developing a comprehensive account of the influence process itself. In this way we provide a framework from which it is possible to understand the impact not only of culture, institutions, and gender, but of social and contextual factors in general.
Overall, then, we look at how leadership operates “in the world” because the reality of leadership is that it is very much “of the world.” Indeed, not only is it a critical part of the world as we know it, but it is also a primary means by which our world is changed. The key reason for this is that leadership motivates people to put their shoulders to the wheel of progress and work together towards a common goal. As psychologists, our focus is precisely to understand the nature of the “mental glue” that binds leaders and followers together in this effort. What commits them to each other and to their shared task? What drives them to push together in a particular direction? And what encourages them to keep on pushing?
To refer to a “new” psychology of leadership is to imply a contrast with an “old” psychology. So let us start with that. In Chapters 1 and 2, we show how, traditionally, leadership research has analyzed relevant phenomena at an individual level. Most obviously, considerable effort has been devoted to the task of discovering the personal traits and qualities that mark out great leaders. And even where research has acknowledged that leadership is not about leaders alone, the emphasis has remained very much on the characteristics of the individual leader and the ways in which these map onto the demands of the situation, the needs of followers, or some other leadership imperative. In short, in all this work, leadership is treated very much as an “I thing.”
We, by contrast, start from a position that speaks to the points raised by Peter Drucker in the quotation at the start of this Preface. For us, the psychology of effective leadership is never about “I.” It is not about identifying or extolling the “special stuff” that sets some apart from others and projects them into positions of power and influence. For us, effective leadership is always about how leaders and followers come to see each other as part of a common team or group – as members of the same in-group. It therefore has little to do with the individuality of the leader and everything to do with whether they are seen as part of the team, as a team player, as able and willing to advance team goals. Leadership, in short, is very much a “we thing.”
This point, of course, is not new in itself. After all, we have just cited Drucker making the same point some 20 years ago. Yet it is one thing to make assertions about what constitutes good leadership. It is quite another to provide a sound conceptual and empirical basis to back up these assertions and to help theorists and practitioners choose between them. If leadership really is a “we thing” (and we believe it is) then we need to understand what this means, where it comes from, and how it works.
Our answers to these questions all center on issues of social identity. That is, they all focus on the degree to which parties to the leadership process define themselves in terms of a shared group membership and hence engage with each other as representatives of a common in-group. It is precisely because these parties stop thinking in terms of what divides them as individuals and focus instead on what unites them as group members that there is a basis both for leaders to lead and for followers to follow. And it is this that gives their energies a particular sense of direction and purpose.
However, here again it is not entirely novel to use social identity principles as the basis for a psychology of leadership. In the Acknowledgments, we note our substantial debt to John Turner whose work on group influence provides the conceptual basis for a social identity model of leadership. As well as ourselves, a number of other researchers—notably Mike Hogg, Daan van Knippenberg, and Naomi Ellemers—have made these links explicit and provided empirical support for the idea that effective leadership is grounded in shared social identity. However, what we do in this book—what is new about our psychology of leadership—is that we provide a detailed, systematic, and elaborated account of the various ways in which the effectiveness of leaders is tied to social identity and we ground this account in a careful consideration of relevant empirical evidence.
As the titles of chapters 4 to 7 suggest, the structure of our argument can be summarized in terms of the following four principles:
First, we argue that leaders must be seen as “one of us.” That is, they have to be perceived by followers as representing the position that best distinguishes our in-group from other out-groups. Stated more formally, we suggest that, in order to be effective, a leader needs to be seen as an in-group prototype.
Second, we argue that leaders must be seen to “do it for us.” Their actions must advance the interests of the in-group. It is fatal for leaders to be seen to be feathering their own nests or, even worse, the nests of out-groups. For it is only where leaders are seen to promote the interests of the in-group that potential followers prove willing to throw their energies into the task of turning the leader’s vision into reality.
Third, we argue that leaders must “craft a sense of us.” What this means is that they don’t simply work within the constraints of the pre-existing identities that are handed down to them by others. Rather, they are actively involved in shaping the shared understanding of “who we are.” Much of their success lies in being able to represent themselves in terms that match the members’ understanding of their in-group. It lies in representing their projects and proposals as reflecting the norms, values, and priorities of the group. Good leaders need to be skilled entrepreneurs of identity.
Fourth, we argue that leaders must “make us matter.” The point of leadership is not simply to express what the group thinks. It is to take the ideas and values and priorities of the group and embed them in reality. What counts as success, then, will depend on how the group believes that reality should be constituted. But however its goals are defined, an effective leader will help the group realize those goals and thereby help create a world in which the group’s values are lived out and in which its potential is fulfilled.
In the book’s final chapter, we draw these various principles together to address a number of over-riding issues for the practice and theory of leadership. Most importantly perhaps, we clarify what a leader actually needs to do in order to be successful. Some readers—particularly practitioners and those at the more applied end of the leadership field—might ask why we take so long to get to what might be seen as the heart of the matter. Our response is that we feel that it is critical to provide a secure foundation before we set out to tell people what to do. We want to persuade the reader of the credibility and coherence of an “identity leadership” approach before we set out what “identity leadership” means in practice.
We believe that this is all the more important given the huge challenges our societies currently face. As a result of a range of global developments—in military technology, in religious extremism, in political conflict, in environmental degradation (to name just four)—the difference between good and bad leadership can reasonably be said to constitute all the difference in the world. We need leaders who not only have the right goals but who can also mobilize humanity to support them. And we cannot advise leaders lightly on a hunch or a whim. We need a case that is built less on opinion and more on well-substantiated scientific argument.
The need for a new psychology of leadership has never been more pressing.