Page Title

The Influence of the Leader Persona on Organizational Identity

January 30, 2004 

"Organizations are generally thought of as social structures and often referred to as communities.  Among their activities are the construction and exchange of ideas.  The quality of the processes factor into whether the community is productive.  To have creative members of the community is desirable.  The contrast is easily problematic.  People are less likely to be creative under stressful circumstances (Amabile & Conti, 1999).  A less innovative or adaptive workforce may result in lower quality services and, in the extreme, the disintegration or the end of the organization's ability to be competitive in its market.  Organizations are divers and range among the possibilities between functional and dysfunctional.  These features determine their longevity and their productivity.

 An organization's stabilization at a midpoint on that continuum is hardly, if ever, the occasion to talk about its leadership unless that stability is viewed as improvement, stagnation, or resistance to change.  Organizations are destabilized when they change.  This includes changes in leadership.  Leaders come and go in organizations and with them they bring and take away parts of the organizational identity.  Leadership has been defined in ways that are task related, that cover themes of egalitarianism, juxtaposed to the use of power differentials, personal characteristics and character traits.  Leadership is linked to experiences associated with adult identity development.  Influences on organizational identity move from leaders to their organizations.  In part the leader persona is a constellation of factors that supports the ways in which communities experience their leaders.

 Discussion of leadership often offer traits and attributes to suggest ways of being within organizational contexts.  Critiques of leadership theory and suggestions for expanding their application and usefulness are important.  Individual identity development including socialization and its influence on the construction of self may prove to be another resource for understanding leadership and organizational identity.  In addition, discussions of leadership and explorations of the use of power differentials are integral to instrumentation in leadership practice.  It is difficult to imagine a discussion of leadership that did not either explicitly or implicitly get around to addressing them.  The importance of knowing oneself as one ascends to a leader position is nearly a universal given.  Although it plays a significant role in leadership, to say one must know oneself still limits the ways an individual can develop as a leader.  It limits their influence on organizational identity if becoming a leader is simply an exercise in understanding oneself in relationship to issues of instrumentation such as the use of power differentials, decision-making, and managing accountability. 

 In his discussion of careers and professional development, Kegan (1994) draws the distinction between the focus on instrumentation or skill development and the contemplation of the internal individual.  Consequently the focus of careers must be on individuals' internal psychological balance as well as on their intellect.  For Kegan, maturity within one's career is a matter of integrated experiences (the internal and external).  The point is that discussion of leadership have been lacking in two areas.  They have not focused on adult identity development and the leadership persona. And, they have not considered the influence of the two on organizational identity.

 Individuals are intriguing in the way they challenge even modes claims of understanding their being.  With regards to organizational identity, even one with a clear mission has no consciousness or sub-consciousness that stands apart from the people who live within its parameters.  Although organizations can be conceptualized apart from the people who function within them, that conceptualization has been and is likely to continue to be a personification of structure and function owing to the socially constructed nature of such entities. They do not exist apart from their social context and the purpose for which they were created. 

 It is possible for individuals to continue to grow, to learn, and to change throughout their lifetime.  The aesthetics of the leaders persona emerges as a product of the fusion of social contexts, phenomenological epistemological processes, and the translation of their products in to practice and in a pervasive way of being.  The behaviors, or to put it differently, practices also referred to as instrumentation, are brought to bear on transactions, the moment to moment, day to day encounter between individuals in formal assignment to the leader role and individual serving as such through the leadership function (Pierce, Kostova & Dirks, 2000).

 Aesthetics here refers to the impressions associated with the leader's way of being.  It is in part perception.  Overall the aesthetics comprises the quality of the leader persona perceived by others.  Social context has been significant in consideration of identity formation and the leader persona.  Contexts represent the circumstances that act upon identity.  Contexts teach rules composed through social interaction and normalized within a myriad of conditions.  The ability to juxtapose oneself in relationship to the tasks at hand, and to individuals involved in or associated with or members of the organizational community, lends a significant quality to one's way of being a leader (Dutton & Dukerich, 1991; Isabella, 1990; Neisser, 1993).

 Self-knowledge makes the design of productive and mutually satisfying relationships eminently more attainable (Neisser, 1993).  Such insights are widely accepted as a positive feature and outcome of the developmental process.  Insight ranks high among the standards that drive searches for leaders. Identity development and self-study are generally treated as processes through which one is mentored.  Identify work can be highly visible.  As part of development, individuals concern themselves with gaining their own credibility. 

 Conventional wisdom regarding leadership and instrumentation issues argues in support of personal insights.  Self-efficacy as a factor influencing the aesthetics of the leader persona can be viewed as trust and confidence in ones ability to pose and then answer questions related to identity.  Phenomenological epistemological processes influence the leaders aesthetics.  Influences on the aesthetics of the leader persona can be contrasted in the following:

-synergistic use of power verses rigid posturing,

-community focus verses individual focus,

-consultative decision-making verses unilateral approaches,

-transactions involving reconciliation of meaning systems verses adversarial positioning.

 The leader persona as an aspect of the individual psychic is unique.  It is bound up in an individual's process of becoming.  The premise of deliberate construction and adaptation includes leadership as part of psychosocial development and assumes the changeability of solely on instrumentation to the individual guided or facilitated self-study.  When considering the design of leadership, there are two issues that come into view: first the deliberateness of a design, secondly the perspective of the design process as facilitative of identity development without an end point, thirdly the philosophical shift in emphasis in what constitutes leadership and the leadership persona.

 For a look at deliberateness in designing the leader persona influences on leaders aesthetics are useful.  Treating deliberateness as facilitative of identity development without an end point presses the individual to view herself as not reaching a point of stasis.  From the understanding of self, the individual is able to more securely turn her focus outward to encounters with others.  The third issue is the more significant of those presented.  What constitutes leadership is seldom answered with regard to the persona of the individual leading.  The leader persona is influenced by social context, the needs of the organizational community giving rise to the need for a leader, and what the individual who would lead along with those who would be led bring to the encounter.

 The way one knows oneself in relation to others, the way one encounters meaning systems whether they are acquired through family orienting experiences (untested), constructed through dialectics (tested), to be adaptive involves one's psychological repertoire of experiences.  With changing cognition the tendency may be to conserve psychological energy and assume one fully understands motivations influencing members of the organizational community and to anticipate outcomes.  Organizations like other communities reflect the contributions of their members.  As such, they are not static; rather, they are developmentally dynamic.

 The starting point here has been with adult identity development.  This makes sense because of the assumption that a healthy, dynamic, adult identity is one -that is able to integrate all aspects of one's life into a way of being that is balanced.  It is useful to consider the process of organizational identity as one that both parallels and is interdependent with individual identity development.  Hopefully, the personification processes and events within organizations and treating those as developing or evolving identity will be equally useful (Curry, 2002, p. 33-42)."

_____________________________________________________________

Reference: Curry, B.K. (2002).  The influence of the leader persona on organizational identity. The Journal of Leadership Studies, 8, No 4.

The Journal of Leadership Studies is available on loan from the OSU Leadership Center.  A complete listing of all the Leadership Center's resources is available on our website http://leadershipcenter.osu.edu

 FYI: the OSU Leadership Center is funded by OSU Extension.

Leadership Discoveries is a free monthly e-mail mailing about leadership research.  If you have any colleagues who would like to receive Leadership Discoveries, please have them send an e-mail message to flynn.61@osu.edu with the message, Subscribe Leadership Discoveries.

Back to Top >

Created: 2007-11-13, Updated: 2009-02-17