Who Makes Whom Charismatic? Leadership Identity Negotiation in Work Teams

Abstract

This study examines charismatic attributions among peers within the informal leadership emergence process. We built and tested the theory with a longitudinal sample of 123 teams. Using an identity negotiation framework, we examined the processes by which individuals came to be perceived as charismatic by both teammates and themselves. We found that individuals engaged in self-verification, which caused their teammates to perceive them as they perceived themselves, while the collective team engaged in appraisal and influenced individual teammates to perceive themselves as the team did. Our findings suggest that these processes are stronger when initial perceptual differences are high and when the identity negotiation process aims at yielding a highly charismatic identity or reputation.