Lecture 3 Readings Flashcards
how do leaders emerge and fall from power?
based on their relationship with followers
leadership is highly dependent on ____
language and social identity
why do leaders define ingroups and outgroups?
it allows for the mobilization of social identity
leadership and social psychological motives
Leaders need to take advantage of members’ social-psychological motives when trying to galvanize a group for action
social-psychological motives include:
- The desire for group distinctiveness
- Positive social identity
- A coherent understanding of social events
- The justification for group actions
language and social-psychological motives
The exploitation of social-psychological motives is fundamentally mediated by language
social identity is…
malleable, fluid, and contextually variable
the social identity approach to leadership on social-psychological phenomena
treats social-psychological phenomena as a reflection of social contextual realities
The social identity theory of leadership
argues that leaders emerge and are perceived as effective insofar that they provide a faithful rendition of ingroup identity concerning significant outgroups
the social identity theory on representations
- Representations are context-dependent
- Collective representations are defined by prototypes
prototypes
clusters of group-defining traits that simultaneously maximize intragroup similarities and intergroup differences associated with particular ingroup-outgroup social comparisons
Four stages of leadership (Reid & Ng):
- Leader emergence
- The stabilization of the leadership position
- Intragroup leader-follower power differentiation
- The abuse of power
language and the leadership process
Language can be used to create material power, conceal or mask the exercise of power, and contribute to making dominance appear natural
prototypicality and power
The relationship between prototypicality and the exercise of influence and power makes it possible to develop and maintain a leadership position
innovation and leadership
By engaging in innovation, the leader enhances their power bases, which can in turn be used to control the prototypical ingroup position, making it possible to secure further power bases
Reid & Ng’s main argument
- Prototypicality is the crucial resource that bonds a leader to the group, but prototypicality is realized, maintained, and stabilized through the creative and dynamic use of linguistic social categorizations;
- Linguistically constructed (yet contextually grounded) categorizations enable the leader to broaden his or her power base – both in reality (by adding reward and coercive power), and as conceived social-psychologically in the minds of followers (by adding legitimate, informational, referent, and expert power);
- The inflation of these power bases feeds back into control of the prototypical ingroup position, and thus the ability to maintain the leadership position. This is because:
a) support from followers aids the task of linguistically manipulating ingroup and outgroup prototypes (followers are more likely to ascribe to the leader’s definition of reality) such that the prototypical ingroup position remains focused upon the leader; and, b) because it makes it possible to side-line pretenders to the leadership position.
example of the linguistic construction of power
Ariel Sharon’s image as a peacemaker was linguistically and strategically constructed. He encouraged violence from Palestinians, which he then used to justify attacking them further
what is the antidote to power?
counter-power
how does the emergence of a prototypical group member occur?
actively
power of established leaders vs. new leaders
Leaders who are relatively well-established generally have greater power at their disposal than emergent leaders
how do leaders maintain their leadership?
mobilizing power and constructing and justifying its use through language
why are linguistic categorizations controlling?
- By producing an accepted categorization, the connotations that follow serve to create an image that was not produced in the initial words
- When such categorizations are widely diffused, they are controlling insofar that they produce a definition of reality
The social-cognitive and power differentiation of the leader from followers leads to ___
an embryonic intergroup categorization that transforms the leader-follower relationship into an intergroup relation
how does a leader gain more power?
by successfully mobilizing the group concerning relevant outgroups
