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Dan van Knippenberg and Michael A. Hogg (Editors). Leadership and Power: Identity Processes in Groups and Organizations. London: Sage Publications, 2003, 263 pages, $42.95 softcover.
If you are a social psychologist interested in leadership and words such as "vertical dyad linkage model" and "valenced protypicality gradient" roll off your tongue with ease, then van Knippenberg and Hogg's edited book is for you.
Leadership and Power: Identity Processes in Groups and Organizations is an ambitious collection of essays drawing on contributions from American and international scholars, doctoral students, consultants, and counselors spanning the fields of organizational behavior, sociology, and psychology. Showcasing theoretical developments and recent empirical research, this dense book seeks to persuade the reader that leadership and power can be understood from social perspectives, with a primary focus on social identity theory.
Social identity theory seeks to explain how group membership and identity shape the perceptions of leaders, self, and others in group and organizational contexts. The theory contends that groups are mechanisms for individuals to maintain a distinct and positive personal identity, and argues that leaders emerge to the extent that they are "prototypical" of such group identity.
The book contains 16 chapters, each devoted to a specific aspect of leadership from the perspective of social identity and following a somewhat similar format. The chapters begin with a theoretical and empirical literature review leading to the main contribution, followed by a synthesis of the findings.
The rationale, purpose, and suggested research directions are expressed in Chapter 1. Maintaining that power and leadership have received insufficient attention in social psychology, van Knippenberg and Hogg assert that leadership is fundamentally a group process that can be understood in terms of social identity and social categorization. The goals of the book are articulated; proposed linkages between social and organizational perspectives are clarified, and the contributions of social identity theories to the understanding of leadership effectiveness are explicated.
Chapter 2 elucidates the three...