Influence Of Psychological Characteristics On New Leaders' Identity Construction

New leaders who are from outside of the organization often meet with all kinds of difficulties and challenges.The biggest challenge is that even if they have the title of leader,their subordinates don't recognize their ability and identity,which will be harmful for management.For the effectiveness of leadership,they need to construct leader identity.To find the specific mechanism,we make a multi-case study of five new leaders from Wowprime's Young Lion Plan.We firstly summarize the challenging environment they are faced with and find that the clues of the situation activate their resilience which further results in the proactive behaviors.We also analyze the influence of the proactive behaviors including information seeking,social networking,job negotiating and positive framing on the results of leader identity construction.And based on the interactive perspective of leader identity construction,we consider the influence of leaders' benevolence and ability that subordinates perceive on the process of identity construction.According to the discoveries above,we induce a mechanism model of the influence of leaders' psychological characteristics on identity construction to show the relationship among resilience,proactive behaviors,benevolence and ability that subordinates perceive and identity construction results.Based on the model above,we collect data through questionnaire and test the mediation effect by the structural equation modeling.The output shows that proactive behavior has a total mediation effect between resilience and the result of leader identity construction,which shows the reliability of the mechanism model.Our innovations are the application of resilience as the antecedent which is more related with thework environment and the introduction and concretion of subordinates' participation in the leader identity construction process.The conclusion above is theoretically valuable to expose the managerial challenges that new leaders are confronted with and to investigate the identity construction tactics.