Me and You: Effective Leadership Through Personal Identification

Have you ever been in a position where your views differ with those of your leader’s? Most of us can relate to this at some point in our careers; having different opinions to those of your leader’s can lead to a healthy debate and can be an opportunity to challenge ideas and drive innovation. This aspect of debate and challenge is one of the most valued aspects of developing a diverse workforce. What happens though when you’re the leader and the diversity of thought results in a fundamental misalignment of long term goals or behaviors? You just don’t see eye to eye and can’t personally identify with your team followers (team or employees).

According to a 2013 paper by Weichun Zu et al, limited personal identification between leaders and followers can have a negative effect – not only in terms of leadership effectiveness, but also in the team’s ability to innovate and their commitment to the organization. The authors present a compelling argument; rather than focus on the impact of organizational identification on employees, we should focus more on the effectiveness of individuals personally aligning with leaders.

Organizational identification, first introduced in 1987 by Cheney and Tompkins, is usually experienced when decision makers select the option which “best promotes the perceived interests of that organization”. The advantages of high organizational identification include greater job satisfaction, improved cooperation and reduced absenteeism. What Zu et al found, is that personal identification results in these benefits too but with greater impact.

This case is supported by a research study published by Hobman et al in 2011 which highlights this difference between organizational and personal identification. The study found that “identification with the leader significantly mediated the positive associations between supportive leadership, intellectual stimulation, personal recognition, in the prediction of job satisfaction and job performance”. While identifying with individuals can have a positive impact, the authors didn’t find the impact to be as great when followers identified with the organization as a whole.

Effective leadership on an individual level is therefore critical to an organization’s success. This even more important in today’s relatively buoyant market where long term commitment to the organization such as high retention rates, is harder to come by. What does this mean for today’s leaders?

Thomas Sy, Professor of Psychology at University of California Riverside, shows how a leader’s perception of his or her followers can have a negative impact when trying to recruit a diverse workforce. In his paper, “What do you think of followers?” and in an interview with Science Daily, Sy highlights the risks around categorizing followers (most often done automatically and spontaneously). “Western leaders may recognize the potential of followers who show enthusiasm, and label and treat these individuals as ‘high potentials.’ However, Western leaders may overlook the same potential in equally capable followers who may not exhibit enthusiasm because their cultural values may inhibit expression of emotions (e.g. Eastern cultures such as Japan and China). This bias may also occur for gender.” Simply put, leaders are individually accountable for the diversity of their workforce, not just the organization’s bottom line.

Alice Eagly, professor of Psychology and of Management and Organizations at Northwestern University, wrote about the subject of effective leadership from a gender perspective in 2005. Eagly found that it was more challenging for female leaders and outsiders (other minority groups) to obtain personal identification from followers.

If identifying with those who look more like us comes automatically and employees are less likely to personally identify with female leaders, how can leaders adapt their behaviors to ensure they attract and retain diverse talent?

Attracting talent

Personal identification is not just about going to the same school and sharing the same network as those you recruit. There are more fundamental value based commonalities which leaders should see as their responsibility to identify in potential recruits. By engaging in transparent discussions during the interview process, being self-aware and looking out for traits that will lead to long term relationships with the potential recruit, leaders are more likely to attract diverse individuals. For a leader to categorize an “other” potential recruit and then discount them because it feels like there is no common ground, is doing injustice to the long term success of the organization and more worryingly, to the potential recruit.

Retaining talent

After investing in recruiting top diverse talent, you don’t want to lose them. Walumba et al found that while transformational leaders may impact a follower’s personal identification by setting a shared vision and inspiring them, authentic leaders are more likely to positively impact a follower by demonstrating high moral conduct or being more transparent about their values. Not only will these employees want to keep working for you, according to Avolio et al, they tend to behave more ethically. In the wake of the most recent financial crisis, surely this is a necessity.

Sharing stories with followers can be an effective way of being viewed as authentic, with employees seeing you as more trusting and trustworthy. By developing authentic leadership skills, employees are more likely to be committed to the organization and more willing to report problems.

Finding common ground

The key message is that leaders are able to directly influence how they are viewed by their followers and thereby shape their talent pipeline by actively seeking to obtain personal identification, while also challenging themselves to finding common ground with “others” – those in the minority. This is important if we are to develop the diverse and engaged workforces we need to compete in a truly global world. Chinua Achebe, the late African writer, summarized the challenge and opportunity in identifying with others different to us; “I tell my students, it’s not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What’s more difficult is to identify with someone you don’t see, who’s very far away, who’s a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.”

Apply this to business, and perhaps we too can begin to see the wonders of sustainable professional careers, even when common ground seems miles away.

By Nneka Orji