Evaluating The Effect of Personal Identity Development on Leadership Quality

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Leadership can be interpreted as how a person view him/herself as a reflection on his/her behavior and relationship towards others. The two main attributes of a leadership system are the leaders and their followers. The dynamics of relationship between a leader and his/her followers is often an indicator of the leadership quality. Incidentally, the dynamics of this relationship will much likely be affected by one’s self-concept. Thus, it is possible that leader’s and followers’ personal identity can act as both mediator and moderator of the interconnection between leaders and followers, and how they behave to construct the leadership system (Knippenberg, Cremer & Hogg, 2004). The focus of this essay is to discuss the effect of youth personality development on leadership quality in the adulthood phase. Furthermore, this essay is going to cover models, theories and opinions provided on the subject.
First of all, to define how one’s self-identity can affect one’s leadership quality, it is essential to understand what effect self-identity has on a person. Self-identity is the core of a person’s reasoning, emotion and behavior. Hence, self-identity can affect the way followers perceive their leaders and vice versa. This observation is plays a major role in the foundation of leader-followers relationship (Hanges, Lord, & Dickson, 2000). The significance of this remark can be verified by using Categorization Theory. Sulsky, Brown and MacDonald (2008) explain that this theory assumes that people rely on a symbol, structures, concept etc. (prototypes) to understand the working/studying environment, and these prototypes play an important role in categorizing leader. Accordingly, leadership, from Categorization Theory’s point of view, can ...

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