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When contesting for political office, leaders do not only seek to build their own following but also to engage in attacks to destabilize opponent leaders. However, research has yet to explore and explain the nature of attacks that seek to destabilize a leader's influence. Building on the identity leadership model which sees leadership as flowing from a leader's capacity to promote a sense of shared identity with followers, we argue that a leader can be destabilized if followers come to see the leader as defiling, devaluing, dividing, and destroying this shared sense of "us." To explore these ideas, we analyzed the attack rhetoric used by Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump during the 2016 U.S. presidential debates to examine how they sought to subvert each other's leadership. Our analysis supports the proposed model and sheds light on the hitherto underexplored topic of leadership destabilization. Moreover, by helping us understand the ways in which principles of identity leadership can be weaponized to destabilize leadership, the analysis defines an important agenda for future research.

AbstractIdentity leadership captures leaders efforts to create and promote a sense of shared group membership (i.e., a sense of "we" and of "us") among followers. The present research report tests this claim by drawing on data from 26 countries that are part of the Global Identity Leadership Development (GILD) project to examine the relationship between political leaders' identity leadership and civic citizenship behavior (N = 6787). It also examines the contributions of trust and economic inequality to this relationship. Political leaders' identity leadership (PLIL) was positively associated with respondents' people‐oriented civic citizenship behaviors (CCB‐P) in 20 of 26 countries and civic citizenship behaviors aimed at one's country (CCB‐C) in 23 of 26 countries. Mediational analyses also confirmed the indirect effects of PLIL via trust in fellow citizens on both CCB‐P (in 25 out of 26 countries) and CCB‐C (in all 26 countries). Economic inequality moderated these effects such that the main and indirect effects of trust in one's fellow citizens on CCB‐C were stronger in countries with higher economic inequality. This interaction effect was not observed for CCB‐P. The study highlights the importance of identity leadership and trust in fellow citizens in promoting civic citizenship behavior, especially in the context of economic inequality.