leadership
Definition
Leadership refers to the exercise of influence by an individual over followers or organizational members in ways that shape collective outcomes, ranging from policy implementation within formal organizations to the mobilization of violence in extremist groups. Within violent extremist organizations, leadership operates through distinct influence styles, classified as charismatic, ideological, or pragmatic, and through power orientations directed either toward personal authority or a collective mission, with lethal organizational performance depending on the interaction between these two dimensions rather than on either one alone. In political contexts, leadership is evaluated by followers through identity-based processes, such that voters extend transgression credit to ingroup leaders accused of trust violations while applying stricter judgment to outgroup leaders, a pattern that intensifies after electoral outcomes rebalance group status. Organizational leadership also encompasses the signaling function that managers perform when enacting diversity and inclusion policy, where managerial position is associated with higher rates of attitudinal and behavioral endorsement compared to non-managerial employees. Across these domains, the effectiveness or consequences of leadership depend substantially on the social and organizational context in which it is exercised.
Sources: Harms et al. (2026), Lalot & Abrams (2025), Bokern et al. (2026)
Related Terms
- ingroup outgroup (1 shared article)
- forgiveness (1 shared article)
- transgression credit (1 shared article)
- trust violation (1 shared article)
- diversity (1 shared article)
- D&I policy (1 shared article)
- inclusion (1 shared article)
- policy support (1 shared article)
- policy resistance (1 shared article)
- terrorism (1 shared article)
- violent extremism (1 shared article)
- lethality (1 shared article)
- multilevel modeling (1 shared article)
Applications
Leadership and Influence Tactics
Influence tactics are the observable rhetorical, imagery, and problem-framing behaviors through which a leader's underlying style, whether charismatic, ideological, or pragmatic, is expressed and through which organizational outcomes are produced. In violent extremist organizations, neither influence style nor power orientation independently predicted lethality; instead, the two dimensions interacted, so that among charismatic leaders a personalized power orientation was linked to far higher annual lethality than a socialized one, while among pragmatic leaders the pattern reversed.
Sources: Harms et al. (2026)
Leadership and Transgression Credit
Transgression credit is the willingness of group members to forgive errant ingroup leaders for trust violations, and it operates through social identity maintenance rather than through assessments of leader competence or genuine trust. In a longitudinal study of 535 UK voters across the 2024 general election, voters for all four main parties were more willing to forgive their own leader than outgroup leaders, and this forgiveness increased after the election for both the winning and losing mainstream party leaders, though not for the anti-establishment populist leader Nigel Farage.
Sources: Lalot & Abrams (2025)
Leadership and Diversity and Inclusion Policy Support
Managerial leadership position shapes how organizational members engage with diversity and inclusion policy, with managers overrepresented among Champions and Reluctants and underrepresented among Ambivalents and Opponents relative to non-managerial employees. This distributional difference reflects the distinct roles and expectations attached to managerial positions, which anchor divergent motivations for supporting policy in both attitude and behavior.
Sources: Bokern et al. (2026)
