Strengthening Shared Social Identity Leadership for Organisational Effectiveness

Abstract

In the past two decades, scholars have increasingly studied the concepts of social identity leadership and shared leadership, but there is very little research combining these approaches. Given the potential that shared leadership could strengthen identity leadership, this study aimed to explore how organisational identity might be collectively actualised in a self-managing organisation, where decision-making authority was radically decentralised. The multisource data included five interviews with vertical leaders and HR, three focus groups with employees, four recordings of monthly company review meetings, and a culture booklet, analysed applying theory-informed thematic analysis. The findings suggest that vertical leaders’ identity leadership is critical in facilitating successful shared identity leadership. Additionally, the results provide new evidence of peer-leader roles that are important particularly in fostering employee identification. Peer-leaders’ identity entrepreneurship and advancement during socialisation created an opportunity to form an authentic and better aligned team. Additionally, their shared impresarioship with vertical leaders integrated the identity into organisational practices and policies. The results indicate that shared identity leadership may critically strengthen its effectiveness. Future research should explore whether the results apply more widely. The findings suggest that team leaders should work with employees to integrate organisational identity across their practices, and policies.MAD StatementOur study explored how more effective social identity leadership might be achieved if vertical leaders collaborated with employees in identity actualisation. Our results suggest that shared identity leadership has a great potential to enhance the achievement of identity-reflecting outcomes such as in this case, organisational growth and innovation, and also employee identification. The first two seemed to result particularly from the vertical leaders’ active identity leadership, which created an organisational environment fostering shared decision-making and supportive of employee-led innovations. Instead, the peer-leaders’ identity leadership was instrumental in promoting identification and setting shared expectations for work; thus, promoting productive collaboration.