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Leadership and identity disruption: The role of social identity discontinuity in producing self-uncertainty
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- Author / Creator
- Syfers, Lily
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A leader's rhetoric can have profound impacts on the groups that they lead. Leaders use their words to evoke uncertainty, define group boundaries, and articulate their vision to the group. Leaders’ can use rhetoric that constructs the group as facing or undergoing a rupture (i.e., social identity discontinuity) in the progression of the group’s culture, values, customs, and ideals over time. Doing so may heighten uncertainty about the group’s future, and thus, the part of the self-concept that is derived from group membership (Ritchie et al., 2010; van Knippenberg, 2011; Venus et al., 2019). I proposed that leader social identity discontinuity rhetoric produces heightened self-conceptual uncertainty when the leader is a non-prototypical representation of the group identity, and when group members perceive that they do not have the ability to exit their group and join a new group. The findings of the three experiments did not support my hypotheses. Instead, the results indicate that leader prototypicality and group permeability may independently moderate the relationship between discontinuity rhetoric and self-conceptual uncertainty. Moreover, that future work may examine whether leader discontinuity rhetoric produces more self-uncertainty amongst members of low permeability groups than continuity rhetoric only when the group identity is clearly defined and differentiated from outgroups. I discuss the contribution of the findings to the social identity approach to leadership.
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- Subjects / Keywords
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- Graduation date
- Spring 2024
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
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- License
- This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.