Identity Leadership, Employee Burnout and the Mediating Role of Team Identification: Evidence from the Global Identity Leadership Development Project

Abstract

Do leaders who build a sense of shared social identity in their teams thereby protect them from the adverse effects of workplace stress? This is a question that the present paper explores by testing the hypothesis that identity leadership contributes to stronger team identification among employees and, through this, is associated with reduced burnout. We tested this model with unique datasets from the Global Identity Leadership Development (GILD) project with participants from all inhabited continents. We compared two datasets from 2016/2017 (n = 5290; 20 countries) and 2020/2021 (n = 7294; 28 countries) and found very similar levels of identity leadership, team identification and burnout across the five years. An inspection of the 2020/2021 data at the onset of and later in the COVID-19 pandemic showed stable identity leadership levels and slightly higher levels of both burnout and team identification. Supporting our hypotheses, we found almost identical indirect effects (2016/2017, b = −0.132; 2020/2021, b = −0.133) across the five-year span in both datasets. Using a subset of n = 111 German participants surveyed over two waves, we found the indirect effect confirmed over time with identity leadership (at T1) predicting team identification and, in turn, burnout, three months later. Finally, we explored whether there could be a “too-much-of-a-good-thing” effect for identity leadership. Speaking against this, we found a u-shaped quadratic effect whereby ratings of identity leadership at the upper end of the distribution were related to even stronger team identification and a stronger indirect effect on reduced burnout.

Burnout: A Review of Theory and Measurement

“…In this Special Issue, ethical leadership is investigated in South Korea with respect to emotional labor and emotional exhaustion [148]. Identity leadership, team identification, and employee burnout are examined in 28 countries within the Global Identity Leadership Development (GILD) project [149]. Security-providing leadership is proposed to be a job resource to prevent employee burnout [150].…”

Developing engaged and ‘teamful’ leaders: A randomized controlled trial of the 5R identity leadership program

“…While the sample of participants for this study was sufficiently large to test our hypotheses appropriately, there would also be value in conducting a more ambitious (Phase IV) multi-site trial of the 5R program along the lines of work on the GILD project which has sought to test and validate the ILI in organizations around the world [ 15 , 25 ]. Amongst other things, such a trial could usefully assess the appropriateness of the program for leaders not only in different countries and cultures but also in different sectors (e.g., those that differ along the dimension of individualism–collectivism [ 102 ]) as well as the impact of leaders’ participation in the program on their teams (something that, for logistical reasons, we were unable to assess in this trial).…”

I am one of you! Team prototypicality as a facilitator for female leaders

“…The identity leadership framework suggests that in addition to prototypicality, leaders can be effective by shaping their group's sense of a common identity by three paths, namely advancement, entrepreneurship, and impresarioship. Steffens et al (2014) developed the identity leadership inventory to measure these aspects of identity leadership and recently van Dick et al (2018van Dick et al ( , 2021 validated the inventory in a global study across 30 different countries on all continents. As the other dimensions of the ILI also focus on the leader as team member and acting in the group's interest, future research should examine if other dimensions of identity leadership can also be converted into an advantage for female leaders-either alone or in combination with prototypicality.…”