From Identity Threat to Identity Gain: The Role of Identity Leadership in Helping Employees Negotiate Organizational Change

Organizational change typically disrupts employees’ sense of ‘who we are’ as an organization. Research aimed at understanding the consequences of organizational change has primarily focused on identity threat when explaining resistance to change. In this review, we expand upon these findings by reframing organizational change as an opportunity to intentionally strive for identity gain, rather than merely mitigating identity threat. We introduce identity leadership as a key tool for navigating change by creating a sense of shared identity. Drawing on the social identity approach and the social identity model of leadership, we argue that leader prototypicality, identity entrepreneurship, identity advancement and identity impresarioship serve as pathways through which leaders and followers can co-produce a positive sense of ‘us’ and advance shared goals. We propose directions for future research, advocating longitudinal, process-oriented and multi-level studies that capture the various ways in which leaders and engaged followers collaborate during organizational change.MAD statementIn this review, we advance understanding of organizational change by shifting attention from identity threat to the conditions that enable identity gain. While previous studies have shown that change disrupts employees’ shared identity, we draw on nascent literature that demonstrates how leaders and followers can instead experience identity gain – a process contingent on the intentional actions of organizational members. This reframing has practical implications; rather than merely managing resistance, change agents can design change initiatives that strengthen organizational identity.