Leadership and social change: a contest for influence
Creators: name: Mohamed, Shaistha
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 2016
Subjects: Leadership
Social identity
Social change
Social influence
Self-categorisation
Self-categorization

description: Social change is fundamentally a process of collective mobilization—of standing up for what ‘we’ believe in and against which that violates the values that define who ‘we’ are. Leaders play a central role in mobilizing social change. It is through a process of social influence that such a ‘we’ is created, and ultimately, embodied in collective behaviour. Yet, the role of leadership in mobilizing collective understandings are missing in this body of work. While social change has been studied as an intergroup process involving conflict between ‘ingroups’ and ‘outgroups’, leadership analysis has been limited to the study of characteristics and behaviour of individual leaders, the focus being on the (intragroup) relationship between a single leader and a group of followers. However, to understand the precise processes through which social change is achieved, an intersection of social change and leadership that involves both intra- and intergroup dynamics needs to be considered more explicitly. This thesis will discuss the nature of leadership as a contest for influence, where competing visions for the society that ‘we’ want to become are pitted against one another. Across six studies, we aim to elucidate when and how leaders for change will be able to successfully mobilize support for their change proposals in a contest for influence. Studies 1 and 2 explored when a leader candidate is successfully able to mobilize the public for change in competition with an existing leader defending the status quo. As predicted, pro-change candidates succeeded in influencing attitude change, securing votes and mobilizing change over a pro-status quo incumbent, only when they were aligned with the group’s change trajectory. When they were ‘non- aligned’ with the group’s normative trajectory, the incumbent retained their influence. Studies 3 and 4 examined whether support for a leader change as a function of contest. As predicted, when a pro-change leader was aligned with the group’s normative LEADERSHIP &amp; SOCIAL CHANGE 14 trajectory, they were more influential and mobilize more support in the presence of competition than its absence. Instead, when pro-change leaders were non-aligned with the group’s normative trajectory, they were more influential and mobilized more support in the absence than presence of competing alternatives. Studies 5 and 6 explored support for leaders with innovative change agendas. As predicted, even when the rhetoric of those leading for change does not align with norms, if the leader is seen to be one of ‘us’ or acting for ‘us’, they were successful in securing votes and mobilising collective action, but also gaining latitude to suggest change and affect who ‘we’ are. These findings show that by pitting competing leaders with different and competing visions for the society, we not only gained a deeper understanding of when change can occur but also when change can fail, where the status quo is maintained or other forms of change prevails. The capacity of a leader to influence and mobilize followers for change depends on how well they are able to capture ‘who we want to be’, and doing so better than the available alternatives.