Amongst other things, the study's findings challenged the role account of tyranny associated with the SPE as well as broader ideas surrounding the "banality of evil".
[4][5] The core insight from the study was that tyranny results from the engaged followership of subordinates rather than blind conformity to roles or rules.
Recent work has also demonstrated that the same analysis can explain the behaviour of participants in Milgram's Obedience to Authority experiments.
[8][9] This work focuses on the role of perceived shared identity as a basis for mutual influence between leaders and followers.
It argues that leaders' success hinges on their ability to create, represent, advance and embed a social identity that is shared with those they seek to motivate and inspire.
Through its capacity to structure people’s sense of self, social identity has wide-ranging implications for cognition and behavior — two of which are especially important for leadership.
Instead, you turn to fellow ingroup members (i.e., other feminists) because you see them as best positioned to inform you about self-relevant features of social reality.
More particularly, we will see others as qualified to inform us about a given social identity—and hence seek out and respond positively to their leadership—to the extent that they are perceived to be representative of a relevant ingroup.
In this vein another large body of research shows that regardless of how prototypical they are, leaders will be more effective when they are also seen to act in ways that advance group interests.
That is, they need to be identity impresarios who devise and choreograph collective activities and events that bring the groups they lead to life and give them a material force.
The form that such activities take necessarily varies as a function of nature of the social identity that leaders are seeking to entrench.
Nevertheless, whatever the domain, the long-term effectiveness of groups and leadership is generally buttressed by formalized identity performances and structures—such things as competitions and conferences, feasts and festivals, ceremonies and celebrations.