The link between leadership and followership: How affirming social identity translates vision into action

Two experiments test the hypothesis that support for leaders is enhanced wh en their decisions affirm a distinct social identity that is shared with fo llowers. In Experiment 1, participants showed less support for a leader who favored ingroup members who were relatively sympathetic to an outgroup pos ition than for one who favored ingroup members who opposed an outgroup posi tion. This finding was replicated in Experiment 2, which also showed that t his pattern extended to support for the Leader's novel plans. Although part icipants indicated that they supported a leader who behaved evenhandedly to ward all ingroup members as much as one whose behavior was identity-affirmi ng, they were unwilling to back up the evenhanded leader with written comme nts and arguments. These data suggest that leaders' capacity to engender ac tive followership is contingent on their ability to promote collective inte rests associated with a shared ingroup identity.