EVIDENCE & IMPACT
What does the science
of “us” reveal about
leadership?
Explore research into how shared social identity shapes leadership, change, performance, wellbeing and collective action.
Explore the evidenceWhere the evidence comes from
Research across 43 countries
Each circle is a country, sized by how many studies were run there. Hover for the count, click to see just that research. Studies that ran across several countries count once in each. The remaining 32 entries are theory and reviews, which collect no data of their own, and 5 studies where the location was not reported.
93 studies with a known location, across 43 countries. Largest circle: United Kingdom (34 studies).
What are you working on?
Choose the situation closest to yours. Each one opens the research that speaks to it, written for practitioners rather than reviewers, with the most robust research designs presented first.
Or look for something specific
The evidence
+How this library was built, and how to read the evidence labels
Research on identity leadership is scattered across psychology, management, sport science, health and political science. This library gathers the most directly useful of it in one place and rewrites each study the way a practitioner would want to read it: the point first, then what to do about it, then the detail.
Entries come from four sources. The first is a working collection of the field's key papers built up over several years. The second is the 61 empirical studies included in a 2025 systematic review of identity leadership (Le and Hoang, Management Review Quarterly), which searched Scopus and Web of Science with no start date up to October 2024. The third is two database searches of our own, one covering identity leadership research published between 2024 and 2026, and one on the 5R programme with no date limit. The fourth is the reference lists of the papers already collected, checked for frequently cited work that was missing.
That produced 250 papers, of which 128 were kept: those where identity leadership is a focal concern, where the text was available to read, and where there is something a practitioner can act on. Papers that mention the field only in passing were left out. Two chapters of a University of Queensland doctoral thesis on scaling the 5R programme were added separately, giving 130 entries in all. What remains spans 2001 to 2026 and includes both the foundational studies and the most recent work. It is a curated library rather than a systematic review, so it does not claim to be exhaustive, and entries are added as gaps come to light.
Summaries are condensed from the source papers and are not a substitute for reading them. Where a study measured things at a single point in time, the wording says a finding is linked to or predicts an outcome rather than causes it. Every entry carries a link to the original so you can check it.
- Strong
- Randomised or controlled trials, and syntheses of many empirical studies.
- Good
- Studies following people over time, multi-study papers, experiments with solid samples, and validated measures.
- Indicative
- A single snapshot survey, a small sample, a case study, or an evaluation without a comparison group. Worth knowing, not settled.
- Theory
- Conceptual papers and reviews that explain how the approach works. No new data of their own.
- Emerging
- Theses and preprints that have not yet been through peer review.
FROM EVIDENCE TO PRACTICE
What could this evidence mean for your organisation?
We help organisations translate social identity research into practical approaches to leadership, change, performance and wellbeing.