How leader role identity influences the process of leader emergence: A social network analysis

By N. Kwok, Samuel Hanig, Douglas J. Brown, W. Shen. Leadership Quarterly, 2018

92 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Contemporary theories on leadership development emphasize the importance of having a leader identity in building leadership skills and functioning effectively as leaders. We build on this approach by unpacking the role leader identity plays in the leader emergence process. Taking the perspective that leadership is a dynamic social process between group members, we propose a social network-based process model whereby leader role identity predicts network centrality (i.e., betweenness and indegree), which then contributes to leader emergence. We test our model using a sample of 88 cadets participating in a leadership development training course. In support of our model, cadets who possess a stronger leader role identity at the beginning of the course were more likely to emerge as leaders. However this relationship was only mediated by one form of network centrality, indegree centrality, reflecting one's ability to build relationships within one's group. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/949e52e3d9d566f98dc7ea27c43d3195fd380597

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In General Health Professions

Bradley L Kirkman

In Safety Research

Bradley L Kirkman

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

The Emergence of Emergent Leadership: A Comprehensive Framework and Directions for Future Research (2021, background): “At the individual level, socially oriented factors include identification with a team (DeRue et al., 2015), behavior role typicality (DeRue et al., 2015), network centrality (Sutanto et al., 2011), status (McClean et al., 2018), and peer relations (Kwok et al., 2018).”