ABSTRACT
Leadership has long been a popular focus ofresearch for the social sciences (e.g., Eagly, Karau, & Makhijani, 1995; Graumann & Moscovici, 1986; Hunt, Baliga, Dachler, & Schriesheim, 1988), particularly for social and
organizational psychology (e.g., Bass, 1990; House & Baetz, 1990; Stogdill, 1974; Yukl, 1981). In recent years, however, it has waned in popularity as a focus for social psychological research and is instead more commonly studied in other disciplines
(see Levine & Moreland, 1990). This may reflect a recent tendency for social psychologists to pay more attention to individual cognition (e.g., Fiske, 1993b; Fiske & Taylor, 1991) and intergroup behavior (e.g., Brewer & Miller, 1996) than to intragroup processes and group structure (see Moreland, Hogg, & Hains, 1994). The present article describes how self-categorization theory (Turner, 1985; Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987), a social-cognitive intergroup theory, can be used to cast light on leadership as a characteristic of intragroup structure.
