Research exploring the powerful links between leadership and identity has burgeoned in recent years but cohered around two distinct approaches. Research on identity leadership, the main focus of this special issue, sees leadership as a group process that centers on leaders’ ability to represent, advance, create and embed a social identity that they share with the collectives they lead—a sense of “us as a group”. Research on leader identity sees leadership as a process that is advanced by individuals who have a well-developed personal understanding of themselves as leaders—a sense of “me as a leader”. This article explores the nature and implications of these divergent approaches, focusing on their specification of profiles, processes, pathways, products, and philosophies that have distinct implications for theory and practice. We formalize our observations in a series of propositions and also outline a dual-identity framework with the potential to integrate the two approaches.

近年来，探索领导力和身份之间强大联系的研究蓬勃发展，但围绕着两种不同的方法展开。身份领导力研究是本期特刊的主要关注点，它将领导力视为一个群体过程，其中心在于领导者代表、推进、创造和嵌入与他们所领导的集体共享的社会身份的能力——一种“我们”的感觉作为一个团队”。领导者身份研究将领导力视为一个过程，由对自己作为领导者有深入了解的个人推动——一种“我是领导者”的感觉。本文探讨了这些不同方法的性质和影响，重点关注它们对理论和实践具有不同影响的概况、过程、途径、产品和哲学的规范。我们将我们的观察形式化为一系列命题，并概述了一个双重身份框架，具有整合这两种方法的潜力。