Construction of Leadership among School Teachers: Does Social Identity Matters?

Abstract

Present study attempts to interrogate the dominant trait based approach of leadership and tried to relook it from group perspective. Investigation was conducted in two phases where teachers were asked about the quality of ideally effective leader they would prefer. The obtained responses were thematically transformed into broader variable which were factor analyzed. Under social identity traditions, leadership is not based on individual characteristics’ but it is a group process (Reicher et al., 2005). Based on this metatheoretical assumption, the present study interrogated the psychometric dimensions of leadership constructed among school teachers and questioned whether social identity matters in the perception of leaders? Result obtained seven dimensions (69.078% of total variance) in which four dimensions viz., achievement orientation, conventional personality orientation, nurturant and health orientation (together constituting 31.133% of total variance) showing the importance of individual characteristics’ of leaders. However, other three dimensions viz., ingroup prototypicality, entrepreneur of identity, and group productivity together constituting 37.935% of total variance showed traces of social identity as potent
reason behind the preferences of ideally effective leader.