OBJECTIVE: Characterization of psychotherapy as the \"talking cure\" de-emphasizes the importance of an active listener on the curative effect of talking. We test whether the working alliance and its benefits emerge from expression of voice, per se, or whether active listening is needed. We examine the role of listening in a social identity model of working alliance.
METHODS: University student participants in a laboratory experiment spoke about stress management to another person (a confederate student) who either did or did not engage in active listening. Participants reported their perceptions of alliance, key social-psychological variables, and well-being.
RESULTS: Active listening led to significantly higher ratings of alliance, procedural justice, social identification, and identity leadership, compared to no active listening. Active listening also led to greater positive affect and satisfaction. Ultimately, an explanatory path model was supported in which active listening predicted working alliance through social identification, identity leadership, and procedural justice.
CONCLUSIONS: Listening quality enhances alliance and well-being in a manner consistent with a social identity model of working alliance, and is a strategy for facilitating alliance in therapy.

In the present research, we introduce and validate a single-item measure of identity leadership-the visual identity leadership scale (VILS). The VILS uses Venn diagrams of sets of overlapping circles to denote different degrees of alignment between a leader\'s characteristics and behaviours and a group\'s values and goals. Key advantages of the VILS over other existing multi-item scales are that it provides a holistic assessment of identity leadership, is short, and can be adapted to address novel research questions that are impractical to address with existing scales (e.g. in diary studies, assessing multiple comparisons of many leaders or groups). Data from three studies (conducted in India, the United States and Germany) provide evidence of the VILS\' construct reliability and validity. Results also showcase the instrument\'s capacity to be adapted to assess variations of identity leadership-for example, by assessing a leader\'s convergence with descriptive and ideal notions of collective self (i.e. with \'who we are\' and \'who we want to be\'). We discuss the value of including the VILS in the toolbox that researchers and practitioners can utilize to expand our understanding of identity processes in leadership and group behaviour.

The social identity approach to leadership posits that leaders\' effectiveness depends on their ability to represent, advance, create, and embed a shared sense of social identity among their followers. Although significant progress has been made in investigating the benefits of identity leadership in adult sports, research in youth sports is still in its infancy. One reason is the lack of a youth-centric inventory that adequately measures identity leadership in this population. To bridge this gap, we developed and validated a long (16 items) and short (5 items) version of the Identity Leadership Inventory for Youth Sport (ILI-Y or ILI-Y-Short-Form) through five studies conducted in three phases of research. Data were primarily collected in football in the United Kingdom, involving a total of 1096 participants. Results of Phase I of this study provided little to no evidence that the ILI - originally developed for adults - was understandable (Study 1) and had factor validity and internal consistency (Study 2) in a sample of youth athletes. Therefore, in Phase II, the ILI was revised, leading to the development of the ILI-Y, which was understandable for youth athletes (Study 3). Results from Phase II (Study 4) also indicated that the ILI-Y exhibited a unidimensional factor structure, which was subsequently confirmed in Phase III (Study 5). This last phase offered additional evidence for the discriminant, criterion, and incremental validity of the ILI-Y and its short form, along with their measurement invariance across genders and age groups, and internal consistency. This study provides sports psychology researchers and practitioners with a valid measure to assess identity leadership in youth sports.

On January 6th, 2021, Donald Trump\'s speech during a \'Save America\' rally was followed by mass violence, with Trump\'s supporters storming the U.S. Capitol to prevent the certification of Joe Biden\'s victory in the presidential election. In its wake, there was a great deal of debate around whether the speech contained direct instructions for the subsequent violence. In this paper, we use a social identity perspective on leadership (and more specifically, on toxic leadership) to analyse the speech and see how its overall argument relates to violence. We show that Trump\'s argument rests on the populist distinction between the American people and elites. He moralises these groups as good and evil respectively and proposes that the very existence of America is under threat if the election result stands. On this basis he proposes that all true Americans are obligated to act in order prevent Biden\'s certification and to ensure that the good prevails over evil. While Trump does not explicitly say what such action entails, he also removes normative and moral impediments to extreme action. In this way, taken as a whole, Trump\'s speech enables rather than demands violence and ultimately it provides a warrant for the violence that ensued.

This paper presents an analysis of identity leadership (Haslam et al., The new psychology of leadership: Identity, influence and power, Routledge, 2020) in the 1988 \'Candlelight Demonstration\' in Bratislava which was a precursor to the 1989 Velvet Revolution. The analysis is based on interviews with the five remaining leaders of the demonstration and addresses three core issues. First, how leaders use performative means (identity impresarioship) as well as limited rhetorical means (identity entrepreneurship) to assemble protestors and create a sense of shared identity amongst them. Second, how these strategies of mobilization are linked to the highly repressive context in which the demonstration took place. Third, we analyse the extent to which these strategies are rooted in a psychological understanding of the processes of mobilization. We conclude by addressing the implications for our general understanding of leadership and the mobilization of collective action and the need for more research into these processes under conditions of repression.

For decades we have known that therapeutic working alliance is a key contributor to client engagement and positive outcomes in therapy. However, we have made little progress in narrowing down its determinants, which is critical in supporting trainees to optimize such alliance. We make a case for the value of incorporating social psychological frameworks into models of alliance and explore the role of social identity processes in the development of therapeutic alliance.
Across two studies, over 500 psychotherapy clients completed validated measures of alliance, social identification with their therapist, positive therapy outcomes, and a range of client and therapist characteristics.
Social identification strongly predicted alliance in both samples, whereas client and therapist characteristics showed few such associations. Alliance mediated the relationship between social identification and positive therapy outcomes. In addition, we found evidence that (a) personal control is a key psychological resource in therapy that arises from social identification, and (b) therapists who engage in identity leadership (i.e., who represent and build a social identity that they share with clients) are more likely to foster social identification and its downstream benefits.
These data show that social identity processes are key to the emergence of working alliance. We conclude with a discussion of how recent social identity and identity leadership interventions might be adapted to train therapists in relevant identity-building skills.

With a rapidly ageing society, healthy ageing has become a key challenge. Engagement in physical activity, and particularly walking, is a key strategy that contributes to healthy ageing amongst older adults. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the efficacy of a group walking program for older adults that incorporates the 5R Shared Leadership Program (5RS). By implementing a structure of shared leadership and strengthening peer leaders\' identity leadership, 5RS aims to cultivate a shared social identity amongst participants, which has in other contexts been associated with greater performance and well-being.
A cluster randomised controlled trial was conducted to test the efficacy of the 5RS group walking program on group identification, group cohesion, walking activity, and well-being, compared to a regular group walking program for older adults. Nineteen older adult walking groups (i.e., the clusters; N = 503; Mage = 69.23 years, SD = 6.68) all participated in a 12-week structured group walking program. Nine walking groups (n = 304) were randomly assigned to the intervention in which participants received the 5RS program in addition to regular group walking.
5RS was successful in strengthening the identity leadership qualities of the appointed peer leaders. Multilevel regressions showed that 5RS succeeded in increasing group cohesion and walking activity to a greater extent than a regular group walking program, while participants\' group identification and well-being increased to a similar extent in both conditions. Furthermore, structural equation modelling revealed that group identification mediated the impact of peer leaders\' identity leadership on group cohesion and well-being (but not walking activity).
By harnessing the capacity of the group and its peer leaders, the 5RS program offers a promising intervention to engage older adults in physical activity.
The study was retrospectively registered as clinical trial on 9 September 2021 ( NCT05038423 ).

Do leaders who build a sense of shared social identity in their teams thereby protect them from the adverse effects of workplace stress? This is a question that the present paper explores by testing the hypothesis that identity leadership contributes to stronger team identification among employees and, through this, is associated with reduced burnout. We tested this model with unique datasets from the Global Identity Leadership Development (GILD) project with participants from all inhabited continents. We compared two datasets from 2016/2017 (n = 5290; 20 countries) and 2020/2021 (n = 7294; 28 countries) and found very similar levels of identity leadership, team identification and burnout across the five years. An inspection of the 2020/2021 data at the onset of and later in the COVID-19 pandemic showed stable identity leadership levels and slightly higher levels of both burnout and team identification. Supporting our hypotheses, we found almost identical indirect effects (2016/2017, b = -0.132; 2020/2021, b = -0.133) across the five-year span in both datasets. Using a subset of n = 111 German participants surveyed over two waves, we found the indirect effect confirmed over time with identity leadership (at T1) predicting team identification and, in turn, burnout, three months later. Finally, we explored whether there could be a \"too-much-of-a-good-thing\" effect for identity leadership. Speaking against this, we found a u-shaped quadratic effect whereby ratings of identity leadership at the upper end of the distribution were related to even stronger team identification and a stronger indirect effect on reduced burnout.

Background: As today\'s organizations are becoming increasingly globalized and adding the impetus to a more remote form of working due to the present COVID-19 pandemic, new ways of collaboration-like virtual teams-have gained importance. In the present study, we aim to investigate how virtual team outcomes are linked to perceived diversity and subgroup formation and attempt to gain some initial insight into the role of the social identity approach to leadership in virtual teams. Method: In the present cross-sectional study, a total of 102 virtual team members participated in an online survey measuring perceived diversity, identity leadership, subgroup formation, perceived performance, and team satisfaction, to examine the factors moderating the relationship between perceived diversity and subgroup formation as well as between perceived diversity and team performance and satisfaction. Results: Moderation analysis revealed that perceived diversity had a negative influence on performance ratings when subgroups were highly perceived to be present, but not if subgroup formation was rated as low. The relationship between perceived diversity and team satisfaction was not moderated by perceived subgroup formation. Furthermore, identity leadership was found to be positively related to team satisfaction and perceived performance, while subjective diversity was negatively associated with both team outcomes. Identity leadership moderated the relationship between perceived diversity and subgroup formation, in that high levels of identity leadership weakened the positive relationship. Conclusion: This study provides first evidence to the importance of the team leader\'s role as a manager of a shared social identity in virtual teams where perceived differences can lead to subgroup splits, as identity leaders may hinder the emergence of subgroups in virtual teams.

Recent trends in the leadership literature have promoted a social identity approach of leadership that views leadership as the process of representing, advancing, creating, and embedding a sense of shared identity within a group. However, a few empirical studies explore how and when global identity leadership affects team performance at the workplace. To address this lacuna, we used multi-source and two-wave data among 81 teams to explore the role of group-based pride and leader political skill in the association between identity leadership and team performance. The results suggest that identity leadership positively predicts team performance through a mediating role of group-based pride. Furthermore, leader political skill moderates the indirect effect of group-based pride such that the effect is stronger when leader political skill is high rather than low. Finally, several theoretical and practical implications of this study are discussed, and future research directions are also suggested.