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The purpose of the present research was to examine the impact of identity leadership on employees' well-being mediated by team identification and trust in the leader.

In study 1, N = 192 employees participated in a cross-sectional online survey measuring identity leadership, team identification, trust in the leader and well-being (i.e., job satisfaction, work engagement, burnout). In study 2, N = 72 university students participated in a vignette study that manipulated high/low identity leadership and tested its effect on team identification and trust in the leader.

In study 1, identity leadership predicted higher team identification, trust in the leader and well-being of employees. Team identification mediated the positive relationship of identity leadership with both job satisfaction and work engagement, while trust in the leader mediated the negative relationship of identity leadership with burnout. In study 2, team identification and trust in the leader were significantly higher in the high identity leadership condition.

The findings are consistent with the few existing studies on the positive effects of identity leadership. However, due to the correlational nature of the data in study 1, future longitudinal field research is needed to support the current findings and further establish causality for the model as a whole.

Identity leadership seems to be promising to increase well-being among employees. Thus, leadership development programs to foster identity leadership and collective identity should be implemented in organizations and further tested with respect to well-being.

This research contributes to an emerging body of research on the social identity approach to leadership and supports the recent claims that social identity might be one of the links between leader behavior and well-being of employees. Moreover, this study is among the first to investigate and experimentally test the underlying mechanisms of identity leadership.

The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of organizational identification on employee work engagement (EWE) and to what extent this relationship strengthens/weakens when moderated by gender and leader social dominance orientation (SDO).

To test the hypothesized relationships, the authors collected data from supervisors (n = 101) and their subordinates (n = 478) working in medium and large organizations in the service industry. To test the hypothesized model, the authors used structural equation modeling in MPlus.

The data revealed that organizational identification is positively associated with EWE. Interestingly, the effects were stronger on female EWE than male EWE. Furthermore, the findings of this study displayed that leader SDO negatively moderated the relationship between organizational identification and EWE. The results of this study were more potent when the leader SDO was low versus high.

The findings mainly contribute to the social identity theory by examining the moderating role of gender and leader SDO on the link between organizational identification and EWE. This study offers practitioners insights into the importance of gender in EWE and the type of leadership. Conducting this study in a developing economy provided a unique contextual finding, which will be helpful for the practitioners who want to improve the work engagement of female employees.