Leadership effects operate through individual perceptions rather than organizational-level membership

Evidence

A potential problem with field studies that use preexisting groups is that group-member interactions may affect their responses, violating the assumption of independence … An alternative approach was to use club membership or store employment as a control variable at the individual level of analysis. This proved to be unnecessarily conservative, as club membership and store by themselves did not significantly affect the outcome measures. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1858

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies that the leadership mechanism in question is individual perceptual, not organizational structural.
• XREF: Connects to the analytic-individualism question in social capital theory (Coleman) about whether outcomes reside in individuals or structures. — connects to: Leadership structure tracks the strength of shared social identity over time. — Stephen Reicher, S. Alexander Haslam, and Nick Hopkins, Social identity and the dynamics of…, 56; Leadership must be understood as a group process rather than a leader-follower dyad — Stephen Reicher, S. Alexander Haslam, and Nick Hopkins, Social identity and the dynamics of…, 35