Dr Ilka Gleibs
Ilka Gleibs is Associate Professor in Social and Organisational Psychology in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science.
What is your area of expertise, and how did your interest for this area come about?
My area of expertise is social identity dynamics and their consequences. This means I’m interested in how the groups we belong to shape part of our self-concept, and how this helps (or hinders) us to navigate the world. In one research project we focused on religious identity in the workplace and examined when and how a religious identity can be in harmony with an occupational identity, and when it might be in conflict. Another area I study is social identity and leadership. The core idea is that leadership is a group process, and that leadership success depends on leadership strategies being perceived as suitable for prevailing or changing group relations.
I started getting interested in social identity early on in my academic career. I think the main driver was my interest in both politics and psychology, and I thought that social identities, for example around national identity, are the connector of these two spheres. While I did my MSc in Berlin, I worked as Research Assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. My former supervisor there, Detlef Oesterreich, organised the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP) conference in Berlin in 2002 and that was my first contact with social and political psychologists. In the following year, I presented my MSc dissertation (in which I compared the relationship between national identity and attitudes towards foreigners amongst Italian and German adolescents) at the ISPP meeting in Boston and decided to continue my studies with a PhD. My PhD dealt with the question of changes of organisational identification during a merger, and I’ve continued to be fascinated by the question of identities and change ever since.
What research projects are you currently working on?
I’m currently working on several projects on the topic of social identity leadership. One is looking at the Covid pandemic as an example of prevailing change. We investigate how identity leadership, as perceived by the followers, impacted on national identification and had consequences for adjustment to the crisis (e.g., through collective efficacy, or by reducing anxiety and stress).
In another study, we examine speeches that President Zelensky of Ukraine gave to foreign bodies (parliaments, conventions etc.) since the war started in 2022. We found that he uses more implicit leadership language (thus, he uses more ‘we’, ‘us’, ‘our’) when talking to geo-politically important audiences (such as NATO, EU, G7), compared to when talking to less “important” audiences. We hypothesise that he does this to increase a sense of inclusion and to foster support for the war defence.
As I’m starting a sabbatical soon, I’m also endeavouring on a new project in which I want to ask the question: Do we need a social psychological perspective of leadership when confronted with the climate crisis? Here I want to bring together what we know about collective identities, pro-environmental behaviour and leadership to understand what kind of leadership is necessary to bring about substantial change when facing this crisis.
What wider impact would you like your research to have on the world?
In the first instance, I do my research “to know the cause of things”, and I also hope that my research helps the ‘betterment of society’. My research on mergers (PhD work) and my work on social psychological processes in health and well-being have both been used by practitioners and have been implemented, for example, in care homes. I’m involved in think-tanks (e.g., What Works Center for Children and Families) and start-ups in an advisory role. But I think my biggest impact is through teaching; I love to challenge students’ thinking and understanding of the world, and I hope they carry this into the world and disseminate the importance of understanding identity and group processes.
What are the biggest challenges in your area of study?
I guess the world is a perplexing place at the moment (maybe it always was), and we are all experiencing change, challenges, and conflicts. One of the challenges for social psychology is to remain relevant and to be able to tackle the big questions we are facing, such as the climate crisis, global conflicts, inequality etc. This is made harder because we are also going through a period of questioning methods and approaches in social psychology, and much of ‘what we did’ or ‘how we did it’ is contested. We also must assert ourselves vis-à-vis other disciplines that might be ‘bigger’, more influential, or just louder (e.g., economics, medicine). Thus, we have to get the balance right between doing rigorous and relevant research, between generalising results vs taking context into account, between theory and application, between incremental knowledge creation and tackling the bigger questions. I think we can get there, but it’s definitely not easy.
What is your favourite topic to teach and why?
I love teaching on the topic of identity and identification to our MSc Organizational and Social Psychology students. For many, this is a moment in which a lot of things they have seen and experienced makes sense and provides them with a new perspective for understanding the world. It’s a topic that people can relate to, but which also has a very thorough evidence base. In seminars, I often ask student to draw their own social identity maps, which leads to very personal but also important insights and is an exercise, they can ‘take away’ with them.