Identity leadership, employee burnout, and the mediating role of team identification: evidence from the global identity leadership development project

Do leaders who build a sense of shared social identity in their teams thereby protect them from the adverse effects of workplace stress? This is a question that the present paper explores by testing the hypothesis that identity leadership will contribute to stronger team identification among employees and, through this, be associated with reduced burnout. We tested this model with unique data sets from the Global Identity Leadership Development (GILD) project with participants from all inhabited continents. We compared two data sets from 2016/17 (N=5,290; 20 countries) and 2020/21 (N=7,294, 28 countries) and found very similar levels of identity leadership, team identification, and burnout across the five years. An inspection of the 2020/21 data at the onset and later in the COVID-19 pandemic showed stable identity leadership levels, and slightly higher levels of both burnout and team identification. Supporting our hypotheses, we found almost identical indirect effects (2016/17: b = -.132; 2020/21: b = -.133) across the five-year span in both data sets. Using a subset of N=111 German participants surveyed over two waves, we found the indirect effect confirmed over time with identity leadership (at T1) predicting team identifi-cation and, in turn, burnout three months later. Finally, we explored whether there could be a “too-much-of-a-good-thing”-effect for identity leadership. Speaking against this, we found a u-shaped quadratic effect whereby ratings of identity leadership at the upper end of the distri-bution were related to even stronger team identification and a stronger indirect effect on reduced burnout.