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The stories we tell about our origins can shape how we think and act – helping us make sense of and communicate who we have “become” over time. To better understand the role that origin stories play in individuals’ work lives, we explore how 92 men and women leaders make sense of “becoming” a leader (origin stories) and “doing” leadership (enactment stories). We find that, despite the uniqueness of their experiences, their narratives converge around four frames, being, engaging, performing, and accepting, through which they understand, articulate, and enact their leader identities. We theorize that these narrative frames serve as sensemaking and identity work devices which allow them to create temporal coherence, validate their leader identity claims, and offer them behavioral scripts. Our findings also unearth key gender differences in the use of these frames, in that men used the performing frame more often and women tended toward the engaging frame. These findings provide novel insights into the ways in which the gendered context of leadership becomes embedded in leaders’ understandings of who they are and what they intend to do in their roles. We discuss the theoretical implications of our findings on scholarly conversations around identity, leadership, and gender.

Impostorism, a phenomenon whereby a person perceives that the role they occupy is beyond their capabilities and puts them at risk of exposure as a “fake,” has attracted plentiful attention in the empirical literature and popular media. However, despite evidence that impostorism is frequently experienced by people in leadership positions, there has been little consideration of why this happens. In this theoretical article, we explain why formal leadership roles—roles that are characterized by elevated expectations, high visibility, and high levels of responsibility—are fertile ground for impostorism experiences. We also discuss how the associated self-conscious emotions of shame and fear, can increase leaders’ risk-aversion and enhance leader role performance, yet at the same time drive emotional exhaustion, and reduce their motivation to lead. This can ultimately inhibit leaders from seeking, claiming, and thriving in leadership roles. We offer individual-, dyadic-, and organization-level contextual characteristics that can either enhance or reduce this phenomenon. We also discuss how supportive organizations can mitigate leadership impostorism. Furthermore, we highlight how women and minority-status leaders may be more vulnerable to this experience and conclude by suggesting the practical implications of the leader impostorism phenomenon for individuals and organizations.