What does the science
of “us” reveal about
leadership?

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.

It began as a collection of the field's key papers built up over several years by Dr Blake McMillan, gathered during his PhD candidature at the University of Queensland under the supervision of Professor Alex Haslam, Associate Professor Nik Steffens and Professor Kim Peters. That was extended in three ways: with the empirical studies included in a 2025 systematic review of identity leadership (Lê and Hoang, Management Review Quarterly), with a Scopus search covering research published from 2023 onwards, and with papers suggested by members of the wider 5R team as they reviewed the library. Adding to it is an ongoing process, and it does not claim to include everything.

Not every entry rests on the same depth of reading. Where the full text could be obtained, the summary was written and checked against it. Where only an abstract could be reached, the summary rests on that, and no statistic is reported that was not visible in a source we could open. Older experimental work is the hardest to reach, so entries from that literature are deliberately sparer.

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.