Innovation Across Cultures: Connecting Leadership, Identification, and Creative Behavior in Organizations

Measuring leadership in sport: Development and validation of the Identity Leadership Inventory - Youth (ILI-Y)

The social identity approach to leadership posits that leaders' effectiveness depends on their ability to represent, advance, create, and embed a shared sense of social identity among their followers. Although significant progress has been made in investigating the benefits of identity leadership in adult sports, research in youth sports is still in its infancy. One reason is the lack of a youth-centric inventory that adequately measures identity leadership in this population. To bridge this gap, we developed and validated a long (16 items) and short (5 items) version of the Identity Leadership Inventory for Youth Sport (ILI-Y or ILI-Y-Short-Form) through five studies conducted in three phases of research. Data were primarily collected in football in the United Kingdom, involving a total of 1096 participants. Results of Phase I of this study provided little to no evidence that the ILI - originally developed for adults - was understandable (Study 1) and had factor validity and internal consistency (Study 2) in a sample of youth athletes. Therefore, in Phase II, the ILI was revised, leading to the development of the ILI-Y, which was understandable for youth athletes (Study 3). Results from Phase II (Study 4) also indicated that the ILI-Y exhibited a unidimensional factor structure, which was subsequently confirmed in Phase III (Study 5). This last phase offered additional evidence for the discriminant, criterion, and incremental validity of the ILI-Y and its short form, along with their measurement invariance across genders and age groups, and internal consistency. This study provides sports psychology researchers and practitioners with a valid measure to assess identity leadership in youth sports.

Introducing and validating a single-item measure of identity leadership: The visual identity leadership scale (VILS)

In the present research, we introduce and validate a single-item measure of identity leadership-the visual identity leadership scale (VILS). The VILS uses Venn diagrams of sets of overlapping circles to denote different degrees of alignment between a leader's characteristics and behaviours and a group's values and goals. Key advantages of the VILS over other existing multi-item scales are that it provides a holistic assessment of identity leadership, is short, and can be adapted to address novel research questions that are impractical to address with existing scales (e.g. in diary studies, assessing multiple comparisons of many leaders or groups). Data from three studies (conducted in India, the United States and Germany) provide evidence of the VILS' construct reliability and validity. Results also showcase the instrument's capacity to be adapted to assess variations of identity leadership-for example, by assessing a leader's convergence with descriptive and ideal notions of collective self (i.e. with 'who we are' and 'who we want to be'). We discuss the value of including the VILS in the toolbox that researchers and practitioners can utilize to expand our understanding of identity processes in leadership and group behaviour.

Building Work Engagement in Organizations: A Longitudinal Study Combining Social Exchange and Social Identity Theories

Starting from the insights of social identity theory and social exchange theory, the present study aimed to understand how social support and organizational identification relate to work engagement. Moreover, it sought to verify if social support and organizational identification interact with each other to explain work engagement three months later. A longitudinal study was conducted on a sample of 150 employees, in which organizational identification, social support, and work engagement were measured through a questionnaire. The results show that when employees can count on their supervisors' and colleagues' support, they will be more engaged in their work. In addition, when an employee strongly identifies with their organization, the employee's evaluation of the social support received from colleagues and supervisors becomes less critical in determining their work engagement. These results confirm our hypotheses and extend the findings of previous research on withdrawal behaviors. From a practical point of view, it seems important for organizations to invest in increasing identification, as well as in building a high-quality social exchange relationship, especially when levels of organizational identification are low or decreasing.