Summary: Do leaders care whether they are viewed by team members as being part of the team? Our findings suggest that leader identities are threatened when followers do not view them as a prototypical member of the team, particularly when the team’s views are misaligned with the leader’s own self-views. We also found that high levels of organizational support can mitigate the negative effects of leader identity threat on team performance and leadership effectiveness.

Is it better for leaders to stand out from the crowd or to be viewed as one of the team? Do leaders even care how their followers view them? These are some of the questions we explored in our recent study. There can often be great pressure on leaders to get results, and leaders are often held accountable if these results fail to materialize. Yet, leaders cannot achieve results on their own. Leaders need followers, and followers must be open to a leader’s influence for effective leadership to take place. In contrast to the common stereotype of the aloof and out of touch leader, we suggest that this inherent dependency means that leaders can feel threatened in their leader identity by how followers view their leadership, especially when follower views of their leadership do not align with their own. This sense of leader identity threat can be destructive to both leaders and the teams they lead, particularly when leaders do not feel supported by the broader organization.

Leader Group Prototypicality and Leader Identity Threat

In our study, published in the Journal of Management Studies, we explore how leaders cognitively and emotionally process their teams’ perceptions of their leadership in comparison to their own perceptions. We do this through the lens of leader group prototypicality. Leader group prototypicality refers to the extent to which a leader embodies the characteristics of their group. Leaders who are perceived to be prototypical are also generally seen as more effective and credible by group members. Thus, leaders have a vested interest in ensuring that their teams view them as being prototypical, or “cut from the same cloth”. When leaders’ and teams’ views about leader group prototypicality are both high, leaders feel validated and confident in their identity as a leader. In contrast, when this perspective alignment does not occur – particularly when teams do not see the leader as prototypical of the group, leaders can feel that their identity as a leader is being threatened.

Leader identity threat strikes at the core of who leaders think they are and can stimulate a number of negative psychological and behavioral responses that reduce leadership effectiveness and team performance. The results of our study suggest that, indeed, alignment between leaders’ and teams’ perceptions of leader group prototypicality does affect the leader identity threat that a leader feels and this threat impacts leader effectiveness and team performance.

The Need for Organizational Support

In addition to this core finding, we also demonstrate that the negative effects of leader identity threat can be mitigated by the leader’s perception of organizational support. When leaders perceive that their organization values and supports their leadership, they are less likely to respond negatively to leader identity threat and are more likely to positively impact team performance and their own effectiveness.

Practical Tips for Enhancing Leadership Effectiveness and Team Performance

Overall, leaders need to be alerted of the dangers of leader identity threat to their leadership. Our empirical results are one of the first to reveal the critical role that leader identity threat has on leadership processes, and therefore leaders may be unaware of the negative implications of feeling threatened for the effectiveness of their leadership. Aware leaders may be able to proactively prepare for and prevent leader identity threat from occurring through enhanced communication and feedback process with their teams. Organizations can aid this process by providing leadership development programs that highlight the impact of leader identity threat. Organizations should also seek to promote environments that provide support to leaders to lessen the negative effects of leader identity threat. One way to do this may be to provide access to executive or peer coaching that can help leaders feel they have the resources to handle challenging situations. In following this advice, organizations and leaders alike can increase the chances that they will be able to overcome the difficulties associated with leader identity threat.