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While organizationally relevant outcomes of charismatic leadership have been studied more extensively, we do not know as much about when and why followers attribute charisma to leaders. Drawing on the self-concept based motivational theory of charisma developed by Boas Shamir and colleagues, we propose that congruence between leaders and followers on a core characteristic, namely organizational identification plays an important role. When leaders are high on identification with the organization, they embody and communicate the values of the organization more strongly in their vision and behaviors, which is likely to affect the attribution of charisma to these leaders, but only for followers who themselves strongly identify with the organization. In contrast, those leaders low on organizational identification are more likely to communicate messages that appeal to followers who are similarly low on identification. A multi-source study in the healthcare sector largely supports our model as congruence between organizational identification levels of leaders and followers is positively linked to perceived charisma and, in turn, charisma relates to followers’ organizational citizenship behavior.

Based on the theory of crossover, the purpose of this paper is to explore the limited but growing body of research on positive crossover, wherein the authors investigated the direct and indirect crossover of work passion between the dyadic setting of leader and followers. The authors hypothesized that the leader’s (follower’s) work passion influence follower’s (leader’s) work passion through direct crossover phenomena (i.e. crossover via empathy). In the study, the authors also examined the underlying indirect crossover mechanism of leader’s (follower’s) work passion via personal identification – the process by which individuals (supervisors and subordinates) realize cognitive overlap between the self and other over time in a relationship. In an attempt to fully understand the crossover of leader’s (follower’s) work passion, the authors scrutinized the pattern of leader–follower relationship quality, which has the capacity to moderate the direct and indirect crossover of work passion from leader to follower and vice versa.

The authors conducted two independent studies and collected a time-lagged data from the dyadic settings of a large trade multinational company (n=77 supervisor and 373 subordinates) and a large manufacturing multinational company (n=89 supervisor and 411 subordinates) situated in Anhui province of China to test the authors’ moderated mediation model of work passion.

As expected the authors found support for all the authors’ hypothesized relationships. Specifically, the results provide support for the notion of direct and indirect crossover of work passion within leader–follower dyads. Moreover, the authors’ findings also support the moderated mediation model of direct and indirect crossover of work passion.

Overall, this study provides a potential way to stimulate work passion in employees (leader and followers) from the perspective of their relationship quality with each other. Moreover, implications for theory, research and practice with prospective future research topics are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to find how leader humility affects employees’ constructive voice behavior toward supervisor (speaking up) and coworkers (speaking out) from an identification-based perspective, and seeks to verify the effectiveness of leader humility in the Chinese context.

Data were collected from 325 employees in four Chinese companies with two phases. In the first phase, the participants were asked to report the leader humility, their identification of their relations with the supervisor, and their identification with their organization. In the second phase, they were asked to report their voice behaviors toward their supervisors and coworkers.

The results indicate that leader humility strongly predicts both employees’ voice behaviors of speaking up and speaking out. Results further suggest that relational identification with the supervisor explains why leader humility promotes employees speaking up, while organizational identification explains why leader humility promotes employees speaking up and speaking out.

Managers with humility can successfully shape employees’ relational and organizational identifications, which in turn encourage their voice behaviors toward supervisors and coworkers. Hence, behaving humbly in working places could be an effective way for managers to promote organizational cohesion and creativity.

Although leader humility attracts much attention in both academia and practice, researchers have been primarily focusing on conceptual development and measurement issues, and empirical studies are rare. This is the first research connecting leader humility and employee proactive behaviors. Moreover, it takes an in-depth analysis of the constructive voice behaviors by differentiating them based on their targets.

This study aims to explore the domain of leader’s creativity and suggests that leader’s creativity can be present as both worker-role creativity and manager-role creativity. Then, the study examines the influence of leader’s worker-role creativity and manager-role creativity on employees’ creativity and team creativity. As a contextual factor, the identification with leader is taken as a moderator at both the individual and team levels.

With data that was collected from 229 employees and 32 team leaders in entrepreneurial and R&D teams of China, hierarchical regression is conducted to test the hypotheses at individual and team levels separately.

The results show that leader identification plays a different role in moderating the effects of worker-role creativity and manager-role creativity on employees’ and team creativity. For the relationships between worker-role creativity and employees’ and team creativity, they are positive when leader identification is high and negative when it is low. For the relationships between manager-role creativity and team creativity, it is stronger when leader identification is higher rather than lower.

This study answers the call for studying the roles of creative role models and provides new evidence of the leader as a role model. The exploration of the domain of leader’s creativity and the different effects on creative outcome brings an interesting perspective on creativity and leadership research.

The present study draws on the advance to develop the content of leader’s creativity. Then, the moderating role of identification with leader between leader’s creativity and employees’ creativity and team creativity is comprehensively examined.

Customer service is crucial for organizations' survival and competitiveness in the hospitality industry. The purpose of this study is to examine how and when servant leadership affects extra-role customer service.

The hypotheses were tested with a sample of 302 employees from a passenger transport company in China.

Results demonstrate that servant leadership was positively related to extra-role customer service and that this relation was mediated by relational identification. In addition, the mediating effect of relational identification in the relation between servant leadership and extra-role customer service was contingent on prosocial motivation.

The study is the first to explore the relation between servant leadership and extra-role customer service from the perspective of relational identification and the moderating role of prosocial motivation.

Geographically dispersed teams have become common in many industries and organizations. Yet previous research on distanced leadership often is done from the perspective of the leader, not the team members. This study examines identification with team leader among distanced and proximate employees in geographically dispersed teams. Through survey research, the study examines the relationship between members' identification with their team leader and four other relevant variables – trust, isolation, accessibility, and information equity. Specifically, the study finds that identification and trust are closely related constructs in both distanced and proximate settings; that perceived isolation is inversely related with leader identification in proximate settings, but not in distanced ones; that accessibility is positively related to identification with leader in both distanced and proximate settings; and that perceived information equity is positively related with leader identification in distanced and proximate settings. Implications for leadership in distanced settings are discussed.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to extend work on the leader‐follower identity transfer by providing the first empirical evidence for the causal relationship between leader and follower organizational identification.

The proposed causal relationship between leader and follower organizational identification (OI) was tested in a scenario study and in a laboratory experiment. Additionally, in the laboratory experiment the impact of leader OI on follower performance was examined.

The results suggest that highly identified leaders positively influence their followers' attitudes and performance by affecting their self‐concept, i.e. increasing their OI.

Improving leader OI provides a promising way for organizations to increase their employees' OI and performance.

The paper provides the first empirical evidence for the proposed causal relationship between leader and follower OI, with implications for individual and organizational effectiveness.

Drawing upon the social identity approach, this research examines whether and how leader–subordinate congruence at high levels of proactive personality facilitates subordinate creativity.

Two different data sets (Study 1: N = 205; Study 2: N = 222) were collected from leader–subordinate dyads in China to provide stronger empirical evidence regarding our hypotheses. Polynomial regression and response surface analyses were used to test our predictions.

Subordinate creativity in the scenario in which the leader and subordinate shared a highly proactive personality (i.e. high–high congruence) was higher than that in the incongruence or low–low congruence scenario. The subordinate's identification with the leader mediated the above relationships such that the indirect relationship between leader–subordinate proactive personality and subordinate creativity via identification with the leader was maximized in the high–high congruence scenario.

The findings suggest that organizations should consider selecting both highly proactive leaders and highly proactive subordinates to facilitate the subordinates' identification and subsequent creativity.

This research highlights the crucial role of leader–subordinate congruence in strong proactive personality for the promotion of creativity and reveals that identification with the leader accounts for the above relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between team leader's people value and team effectiveness based on social identity theory. This paper focuses on how team leader's people value affects team effectiveness in the Chinese context. It also examines the mediating effect of leader identification between leader's people value and team effectiveness.

A literature review on people value, leader identification and team effectiveness provided the authors' model and hypothesis. Using a sample of 64 teams with 386 employees and 64 team leaders from ten companies, hierarchical regression was conducted to test the hypothesis.

The findings suggest that follower's identification with leader is an important way to understand leader's people value for employees in encouraging employees to strive for team effectiveness. Leaders in teams should pay special attention to their people value for employees.

The data are self‐reported and subject to biases, and may not be accurate, Both the scales of leader identification and team effectiveness were developed in western countries, and they may not capture the full meaning in China. Cross‐sectional data were used in this study; future research should use a longitudinal design to prove the direction of causality among the contracts.

This paper is original in its investigation on how leader's people value influences team effectiveness, through the mediation of leader identification at team level in a Chinese context.