Exploring Implicit Leadership to Promote Change

The purpose of this workshop is to explore how expectations about leadership influence how people work with one another to create change. Using a social-identity theoretical lens (Hogg & van Knippenberg, 2003), perceptions about the needed leadership characteristics and competencies can be explored as implicit leadership theories (ILTs). ILTs are the cognitive structures each person uses to evaluate leadership attributes, characteristics, and behaviors to make inferences about leaders and leadership outcomes. In other words, engaging as a change leader requires navigating one's own ILTs and the ILTs of other stakeholders. Although ILTs have been studied from a general leadership perspective outside of higher education (Den Hartog et al., 1999; Dorfman et al., 2004; Offerman & Coats, 2018), there is also a recognition that ILTs are influenced by context; for example, organizational type (e.g., community college or research university), role (e.g., department chair or faculty member), and culture (e.g., U.S. or China) (Lord et al., 2020). Additionally, though ILTs may influence the "how" of leadership change processes, they can also influence the "who" of leadership because people use ILTs to evaluate themselves as leaders. People can develop ILTs that prevent seeing themselves as a leader, thus preventing them from developing an identity as a leader (Murphy & Johson, 2011).

Within this workshop, we will 1) explore the diversity of ILTs within participants and 2) explore strategies to proactively manage ILTs to promote effective change leadership.

This workshop was originally piloted (2021) in connection with the current NSF-IUSE funded proposal, Change Leadership Development Program (CLDP), launched by the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CIRTL). The goal of CLDP is to empower graduate students and postdocs to contribute to departmental and institutional systemic change to strengthen and transform STEM undergraduate education.