Intergroup Leadership: Leading Across Conflicting Social Identities

Resolving or managing intergroup conflict is a significant and often arduous leadership challenge, yet existing theory and research rarely, if ever, discuss or examine this situation. Leaders confront a significant challenge when they provide leadership across deep divisions between distinct subgroups defined by self-contained identities—the challenge is to avoid provoking subgroup identity threat. This dissertation develops and tests a new formal theory of intergroup leadership (Hogg, van Knippenberg & Rast, 2012a), which argues that effective intergroup leadership requires the leader to develop and promote an intergroup relational identity—a social identity that is defined in terms of the cooperative and mutually promotive relationship between subgroups. To test the initial propositions of this theory, two studies were conducted to test the core hypothesis that leaders promoting an intergroup relational identity will be better evaluated than leaders promoting a collective identity where identity threat exists; in the absence of threat, leaders promoting a collective identity will prevail. Study 1 (N = 170) was a survey and Study 2 (N = 236) was a quasi-experiment conducted with students at Erasmus University in The Netherlands. Study 2 was identical to Study 1, except collective and intergroup relational identity promotion were manipulated in the leader's presentation, rather than measured. The results of these two studies generally supported this basic proposition of the theory of intergroup leadership. Study 1 demonstrated that support, trust, and perceived effectiveness were strengthened for leaders promoting an intergroup relational identity and weakened for leaders employing collective identity language under an identity threat. Building on Study 1 and using a quasi-experimental design, the results of Study 2 show that as followers' subgroup identity distinctiveness was threatened more, perceptions of trust and effectiveness were significantly weakened for leaders using collective identity rhetoric but strengthened, only in the case of trust (not effectiveness), for leaders advocating an intergroup relational identity. With the current dissertation studies providing initial support for the basic hypotheses of this theory of intergroup leadership, future researchers can now move forward to develop and test the next series of propositions outlined by this theoretical framework.