Social Identity Theory of Leadership

Abstract

A social identity theory of leadership is described that views leadership as a group process generated by social categorization and prototype-based depersonalization processes associated with social identity. Group Over the past 25 years social psychology has placed relatively little emphasis on the study of leadership. This is probably associated with the well-documented decline during the 1960s and 1970s of interest in small group research, the associated ascendency of social cognition, the European emphasis on large scale intergroup relations, and the "outsourcing" of small group and leadership research to organizational and management departments (for historical overviews, see