COMMANDING FOLLOWERS

The new psychology of leadership pulls its focus on social processes. It explicitly looks at the involvement of followers in the leadership. This psychology of leadership operates on four rules that make for its effectiveness and they are:

The rule of being in group prototype: This is essentially about the leader being one of us. Being one of us means more than just being a member of a currently salient social category. It’s explicitly exemplifying what it means to be us, what makes us us, also what makes us different from them. Every group compares itself in some way to another group, any person who is going to be that prototypical group member needs to be perceived to be most like us and most not like them if they are going to occupy that position of being one of us. Leaders are influential when they are most like us (group), least like them (other groups), and adaptable to changes in group identity. When followers have a leader who is prototypical of the group, this enhances overall satisfaction with group life, perception of the leader’s effectiveness, and leader trustworthiness.

Being in group Champion or Doing it for us: Doing it for us is about thinking about those collective goals, understanding the collective goals of your particular social group and working towards those goals. Leaders need to articulate the vision of the group in a way that seems like a realization of the group’s goals. Leaders need to create a track record of championing the group’s interest. If they’re going to have influence and real impact, they need to have been seen in the past to have worked for the group’s goal and continue to do so in the future. They need to provide things that matter to the group’s social identity and it’s only through the leaders detailed understanding of group’s social identity that they can start to generally have influence and impact.

Being an entrepreneur of identity: This is about helping us (group) to understand who us is. It means to craft a sense of us. Leaders need to be seen as representatives of the group, the way they dress, the way they look, the start of activities that they partake in that becomes important to us and helps us see them as one of us.

Being an inventor of identity: This is making us (group) matter. The leader needs to construct our world, they need to help us make a world, and they need to help us make a world in which a sense of us can be made to matter. This is about vision; this is about understanding where we’re going as a group and why it’s important for us.