The New Psychology of Leadership

Identity, Influence and Power

S. Alexander Haslam, Stephen D. Reicher, Michael J. Platow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351108218
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie in der Psychologie

This groundbreaking book provides a refreshing introduction to the field of leadership and is jam-packed with theoretical and practical insights derived from a wealth of applied scientific research conducted by the authors and their colleagues around the world over the last three decades.

It starts from the premise that leadership is never just about leaders. Instead it is about leaders and followers who are joined together as members of a social group that provides them with a sense of shared social identity – a sense of "us-ness". In these terms, leadership is understood as the process through which leaders work with followers to create, represent, advance, and embed this sense of shared social identity. The new edition of this award-winning book presents a wealth of evidence from historical, organizational, political and sporting contexts to provide an expanded exploration of these processes of identity leadership in action. In particular, it builds upon the success of the first edition by examining the operation of identity leadership in contemporary society and fleshing out practical answers to key organizational and institutional challenges.

Drawing on real-world examples and rich data sources, this book will appeal to academics, researchers, and students of psychology, business, and management, as well as to practitioners, policy makers, and anyone interested in the workings of leadership, influence, and power.

Chapter 1
The old psychology of leadership

Great men and the cult of personality

Effective leadership involves influencing others so that they are motivated to contribute to the achievement of group goals. This process lies at the heart of human progress. Scarcely any advance that civilization has made would have been possible without it – whether in arenas of politics and religion, science and technology, art and literature, sport and adventure, or industry and business. For good or for ill, leaders are widely recognized as the proper focus for our attempts to understand the tides and shape of history. As a result, from an early age, we are told wonderful stories about the role that great leaders have played in making history and initiating the changes that have created the world as we know it.

This focus fuels widespread fascination with the lives of leaders, and more particularly with their individual psychology. How were they brought up? What key events shaped their intellectual and social development? What are their defining psychological characteristics and traits? What makes them so special?

To answer such questions, a vast industry has grown up in which all manner of people have found voice: not only psychologists but also management theorists, historians, politicians and political scientists, theologians, philosophers, journalists, and a range of social commentators. Their contributions include scientific analyses, scholarly biographies, and popular accounts of leaders’ lives. The nature of these contributions is varied and far-reaching, and a great many are both very insightful and highly readable. However, almost without exception, these various treatments advance an individualistic understanding of leadership that sees this as grounded in the nature of leaders as unique persons. In this way, leadership is seen to arise from a distinctive psychology that sets the minds and lives of great leaders apart from those of others as different, special, superior.

This book does not seek to diminish the contribution that great leaders have made to the shaping of society, nor does it seek to downplay the importance of their psychology. What it does do, however, is question and provide an alternative to this individualistic consensus. Rather than treating leadership as something that derives from leaders’ psychological uniqueness, we argue the very opposite: that effective leadership is grounded in leaders’ capacity to embody and promote a psychology that they share with others. Stated most baldly, we argue for a psychology that regards leadership as the product of an individual’s “we-ness” rather than of his or her “I-ness.”

As we will see, this perspective forces us to see leadership not as a process that revolves around individuals acting and thinking in isolation but as a group process in which leaders and followers are joined together – and perceive themselves to be joined together – in shared endeavor. It also follows from this point that in order to understand leadership properly, our gaze needs to extend beyond leaders alone. It needs to encompass the followers with whom they forge a psychological connection and whose effort is required in order to do the work that drives history forward. It also needs to encompass the group in which leaders and followers come together: its history, its culture, and its relations to other groups in any given context.

We need this broad gaze because the proof of leadership is not simply the emergence of a big new idea or the development of a vision for sweeping change. Rather, it also involves the capacity to convince others to contribute to processes that turn ideas and visions into reality and that help to bring about change. For this reason, leadership is always predicated on followership, and the psychology of these two processes is inextricably intertwined. Critically too, we will see that followers can only be moved to respond enthusiastically to a leader’s instruction when they see the leader as someone whose psychology is aligned with theirs – when he or she is understood to be “one of us” rather than someone who is “out for themselves” or “one of them.”

We readily recognize, however, that persuading readers of the merits of this approach to leadership is no easy task. Not least, this is because the traditional psychology of leadership remains deeply ingrained both in psychological theorizing and in popular consciousness. Its intellectual shackles are both tight and heavy.¹ Accordingly, we need to start our journey by inspecting those shackles and then loosening ourselves from their grasp.

Leadership in history: The “great man” and his charisma

If there is one model of leadership that exemplifies the individualistic consensus that we have identified as lying at the heart of the old psychology of leadership, it is that of the “great man.” This, indeed, is one of the cornerstones of traditional academic and popular understandings of leadership. It is the model we were first introduced to in childhood books about monumental figures such as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Abraham Lincoln. It is the model that is found in those history texts that recount the feats and extol the virtues of extraordinary figures who seem a race apart from the rest of us. It is the model that informs the biographies of leading businessmen that line the shelves of airport bookstalls and that invite us to follow in their footsteps to success, influence, and tremendous personal wealth. It makes for wonderful reading, but as a window into the causes of great leaders’ success it is deeply flawed. Not least, this is because by defining its subject matter in a manner that precludes interest in “great women,” the approach displays its partiality from the outset (Haslam, 2010).

One of the earliest formal statements of the “great man” model is found in Plato’s Republic (380 BC/1993), a text that takes the form of a dialogue between the master, Socrates, and his student, Adeimantus. Socrates starts by asserting that only a rare class of philosopher-ruler is fit to lead the uneducated and brutish majority and that, without such people, democracy itself is in peril:

Socrates: Look at it in the context of what we were saying earlier. We agreed that a philosopher has a quickness of learning, a good memory, courage, and a broadness of vision.

Adeimantus: Yes.

Socrates: From his earliest years, then, he’ll outclass other children at everything, especially if he is as gifted physically as he is mentally, won’t he?

Adeimantus: Of course.

Socrates: So when he grows up, his friends and fellow citizens will want to make use of him for their own affairs?

Adeimantus: Naturally….

Socrates: That leaves us with only a tiny number of people, Adeimantus.

(Plato, 380 BC/1993, pp. 217–218)

Although only embryonic, Plato’s analysis set the scene for the larger body of subsequent leadership research that has gone on to focus attention on the psychology of the individual and to argue that it is the leader’s distinctive and exceptional qualities that mark him (rarely, her) out as qualified not only for responsibility and high office but also for universal admiration and respect.

In essence too, work of this form provides a straightforward response to the perennial question of whether great leaders are born or made. It answers “born.” It suggests that leaders are individuals who are superior to others by virtue of their possession of innate intellectual and social characteristics. In short, leaders are simply people who are made of “the right stuff” and this stuff is seen to be in short supply. Writing over a century before Plato, the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus expressed this point very bluntly: “The many are worthless, good men are few. One man is ten thousand if he is the best” (500 BC; cited in Harter, 2008, p. 69).

Moving forward over 2,000 years, similar views were articulated in an influential series of lectures on Heroes and Hero Worship delivered by Thomas Carlyle in May 1840 (see Figure 1.1). In the first of these lectures, “The Hero as Divinity,” Carlyle declared that “Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.” He went on:

We cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man, without gaining something by him. He is the living light-fountain, which it is good and pleasant to be near. The light which enlightens, which has enlightened the darkness of the world.

(Carlyle, 1840, p. 5)

Once more, we are encouraged to regard the stuff of leadership not as the stuff of ordinary mortals but as the stuff of male gods.

Figure 1.1 Thomas Carlyle

Note: Carlyle was an influential 19th-century thinker who played a key role in shaping the attitudes of early Victorians to a range of topics, not least leadership, where he expounded the view that this was the preserve of “great men.” This bust of him is on display in his home (now run as a museum by the National Trust) in the fashionable London suburb of Chelsea.

Source: The authors.

Exactly what this stuff is has been a topic of intense debate for most of the 2,500 years that separate the world of Heraclitus from ours today. Commonly, though, it is conceptualized in terms of distinctive traits that are believed to make those who possess them inherently more adept at directing, managing, and inspiring the remainder of the population who require their direction, management, and inspiration.

Different analyses place an emphasis on the importance of different traits. For Socrates the defining characteristics of a great leader were quickness of learning, good memory, courage, and broadness of vision, as well as physical presence and prowess. Distilled into contemporary psychological thinking, these ideas are typically related to mental qualities such as decisiveness, insight, imagination, intelligence, and charisma. Of these, it is the last – charisma – that has received the most intense scrutiny. In many ways, this is because the idea of charisma captures particularly well the sense of “something special” surrounding great leaders and our relationship with them.

Reviewing the development of thinking about charisma, Charles Lindholm (1990) charts a lineage that progresses from John Stuart Mill’s (1859–1869/1975) notion of the genius whose pleasures are of a higher order than the animalistic gratifications of the majority, through Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1885/1961) Übermensch (or “superman”) who is impervious to both pleasure and pain, to Gustave Le Bon’s (1895/1947) notion of the hypnotic crowd leader. However, it was in the seminal writings of Max Weber (1921/1946, 1922/1947) that the concept of charisma was first introduced explicitly and explored in depth.

As Antonio Marturano and Paul Arsenault (2008) point out, in the original Greek the word “charisma” (χάρισμα) has multiple meanings – including the power to perform miracles, the ability to make prophecies, and the capacity to influence others. Generally, though, the term is taken to refer to the idea of a leader’s “special gift.” Yet rather than seeing this simply as a gift that leaders possess, Weber’s use of the term also referred to charisma as something that is conferred on leaders by those in the community that they lead. As he put it:

The term “charisma” will be applied to a certain quality of an individual personality by which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual is treated as a leader.… It is very often thought of as resting on magical powers. How the quality in question would ultimately be judged from any ethical, aesthetic, or other such point of view is entirely indifferent for purposes of definition. What is alone important is how the individual is regarded by those subjected to charismatic authority, by his “followers” or “disciples.”

(Weber, 1922/1947, p. 359)

Unfortunately, the nuanced meaning that Weber gave the term has tended to get lost in more recent academic writing as well as in lay usage. In part this is because Weber’s writings on charisma were themselves inconsistent, sometimes treating it as an attribution to leaders and sometimes as an attribute of leaders (Iordachi, 2004; Loewenstein, 1966). In line with the latter reading, contemporary references to charisma tend to regard it as ...