Running Head: Social identity and leadership dynamics

Social identity and leadership dynamics 2 Traditional models see leadership as a form of zero-sum game in which leader agency is achieved at the expense of follower agency and vice versa. Against this view, the present paper argues that leadership is a vehicle for social identity-based collective agency in which leaders and followers are partners. Drawing upon evidence from a range of historical sources and from the BBC Prison Study, the present paper explores the two sides of this partnership: the way in which a shared sense of identity makes leadership possible and the way in which leaders act as entrepreneurs of identity in order to make particular forms of identity and their own leadership viable. The analysis also focuses (a) on the way in which leaders ’ identity projects are constrained by social reality, and (b) on the manner in which effective leadership contributes to the transformation of this reality through the initiation of structure that mobilizes and redirects a group’s identity-based social power. Social identity and leadership dynamics 3 Social identity and the dynamics of leadership: Categorization, entrepreneurship and power in the transformation of social reality In May 1840 Thomas Carlyle delivered a series of influential lectures on ‘Heroes an