Ospina Foldy 2009

The Leadership Quarterly 20 (2009) 876896
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
The Leadership Quarterly

j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w. e l s ev i e r. c o m / l o c a t e / l e a q u a
A critical review of race and ethnicity in the leadership literature: Surfacing

context, power and the collective dimensions of leadership
Sonia Ospina , Erica Foldy
Wagner School of Public Service, New York University, The Puck Building, 295 Lafayette St., 2nd oor, New York, NY 10012, United States
a r t i c l e
Keywords:
Critical race theory
Relational leadership
Social identity
Intersectionality
i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Leadership studies focusing on raceethnicity provide particularly rich contexts to illuminate
the human condition as it pertains to leadership. Yet insights about the leadership experience
of people of color from context-rich research within education, communications and black
studies remain marginal in the eld. Our framework integrates these, categorizing reviewed
studies according to the effects of raceethnicity on perceptions of leadership, the effects of
raceethnicity on leadership enactments, and actors' approach to the social reality of race
ethnicity. The review reveals a gradual convergence of theories of leadership and theories of
raceethnicity as their relational dimensions are increasingly emphasized. A shift in the
conceptualization of raceethnicity in relation to leadership is reported, from a constraint to a
personal resource to a simultaneous consideration of its constraining and liberating capacity.
Concurrent shifts in the treatment of context, power, agency versus structure and causality are
also explored, as are fertile areas for future research.
2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
As the US marks the rst year in ofce of its rst African American president, the need for a review of the research on leadership
and raceethnicity is compelling. Research suggests that even as many black leaders and other leaders of color thrivein part by
drawing on their racial and ethnic identitythey continue to face profound obstacles to their leadership. On its own, this
contradiction suggests that an exploration of the intersecting territories of race and leadership would be productive. However, for
a number of reasons, we believe that mapping this territory is crucial.
First, race continues to create a fundamental fault line in the US (Marable, 1996; Wood, 2002, p. 3). Indeed, as Omi and
Winant (1994) suggest, social actors are inserted in a structure permeated with racial meanings that affect how we comprehend,
explain and act in the world. As they indicate, despite its uncertainties and contradictions, the concept of race continues to play
a fundamental role in structuring and representing the social world in this society (Omi & Winant, 1994, p. 55). Because of this
critical role, raceethnicity is often central to how individuals and collectives dene themselves, either explicitly or implicitly
(Yanow, 2003). If society, communities and individuals are all signicantly informed by race, then leadership must be as well.
Second, this inquiry allows us to address a larger concern in the eld: to effectively conceptualize and incorporate context in
understandings of leadership. Despite overwhelming agreement about the importance of context (Biggart & Hamilton, 1987;
Jackson & Parry, 2008; Kets de Vries, 2001; Osborn, Hunt, & Jauch, 2002) this remains an under-researched area particularly in
organizational leadership (Porter & McLaughlin, 2006, p. 206). Without addressing context, our theories of leadership remain
incomplete, making it more difcult to offer practical guidelines to address the leadership demands of changing organizations in
contemporary society.
Corresponding author. Tel.: + 1 212 998 7436.

E-mail addresses: sonia.ospina@nyu.edu (S. Ospina), Erica.foldy@nyu.edu (E. Foldy).
1048-9843/$ see front matter 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2009.09.005
S. Ospina, E. Foldy / The Leadership Quarterly 20 (2009) 876896
877
Effectively conceptualizing and incorporating context provides a path to explore the how of leadership, thus bringing back the
ship to leadership (Grint, 2005). An earlier focus on positional leaders' traits pointed to the who and where. A later focus on
styles, behaviors, cognitions and functions claried the what of leadership. A focus on the how of leadership examines how the
inuence process unfolds among actors engaged in producing desired outcomes and the mechanisms underlying the construction
of inuence. This agenda is particularly relevant given present theoretical developments that emphasize the shared and collective
dimensions of leadership (Ford & Seers, 2006; Hiller, Day, & Vance, 2006; Ospina & Sorensen, 2006; Pearce & Sims, 2002; Uhl-Bien,
2006).
Third, the organizational trends that amplify functional demands to cultivate both connectedness and difference (Saz-Carranza
& Ospina, 2008) provide an important setting where the complex reality of raceethnicity becomes part of the phenomenon of
leadership. The movement toward less bureaucratic, more loosely associated organizational forms increases the urgency of
demands for unity within increasingly fragmented environments. Moreover, the valuing of difference while nding common
purpose is required by a growingly diverse workforce and clientele across all organizational contexts (Mumford, Zaccaro, Harding,
Jacobs, & Fleishman, 2000). Identifying insights about the role that raceethnicity plays in this work is the beginning of a deeper
understanding of how connection is fostered without suppressing difference. This is an important dimension of the work of
leadership (Fletcher, 2008, 2004; Foldy, Rivard, & Buckley, 2009; Ospina & Foldy, forthcoming) that demonstrates the need for the
richer conceptualizations of context that are necessary for its empirical study.
Finally, attention to race also surfaces particular understandings of the role of power in leadership and the context of leadership
(Delgado & Stefancic, 2001; Omi & Winant, 1994; Yosso & Solorzano, 2005). Of course, as others have noted, leadership and power
are inextricably intertwined (Burns, 1978). But attending to race brings an understanding of power not only as a resource for
individuals, but also as a web of institutionalized inequities that systematically, and at the expense of others, provides privilege to
some communities and some perspectives. At the same time, examining leadershipsince leadership is fundamentally about
agencyhelps us understand how individuals and collectives have resisted, and in some cases transformed, these inequitiescreating spaces where marginalized voices become powerful.
In research on leadership, the experiences of people of color are often treated as a special case, rather than as the potential
source for theorizing from within a particularly important social context, given the pervasiveness and impact of race in social
experience. Insights from research that explicitly concern the inside perspective of people of color are often downplayed or
ignored (Tillman, 2004). These gaps in the eld considerably reduce our capacity to understand the full complexity of leadership.
We suggest that the eld canand mustlearn from leadership studies that focus on raceethnicity as particularly rich contexts
within which insights about the human condition as it pertains to leadership can be gained.
For all these reasons, we undertook this exploration of the intersection of race and leadership. A two-fold question guides this
review: How has the leadership literature to date treated race? And, given key theoretical developments in the eld, what
particularly fertile areas in the relationship between race and leadership should be explored?
Altogether our review suggests the gradual convergence of theories of raceethnicity and theories of leadership. Leadership
studies that explore race increasingly use a uid and dynamic conceptualization of social identity that highlights its collective
dimensions. Similarly, the leadership eld itself increasingly views leadership as the dynamic relationships between both leaders
and followers (Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995; Uhl-Bien, 2006), and moving beyond this paradigm, as the relational property of a system
manifested in collective achievements owned by a group (Drath, 2001; Ospina & Sorensen, 2006; Uhl-Bien, 2006). Emphasizing
the collective dimensions of both raceethnicity and leadership may yield context-rich leadership research, and contribute to the
goal of exploring the how of leadership.
In addition to race, we also consider ethnicity in this review. Both race and ethnicity represent important ingredients in the
constitution of collective identities and in the work of leadership (Ospina & Su, 2009). While race and ethnicity are contested terms
that have often been used interchangeably, traditionally, race has been conceptualized as a classication based largely on visible
physical traits, while ethnicity has been seen as relating more to customs and traditions learned from ancestors.. In practice, the
boundaries between them are increasingly murky and their social effects are often impossible to disentangle (Landson-Billings,
2000). In our paper we follow Yanow's (2003) choice to use the single referent raceethnicity for both identities, unless we are
specically referring to one of them. (We also want to acknowledge Cox's (1993) term racioethnicity which had been introduced
some years earlier.) In addition, in this review we employ a variety of termsblack and African American, Latino and Hispanic
which usually follow the nomenclature of the authors reviewed.
In summary, to clarify what raceethnicity can tell us about leadership, our review inquires into the ways scholars have treated
the relationship between them. We hope that our analysis advances the eld's deeper consideration of context, and further opens
the black box about the how of leadership. The paper is structured as follows: We rst briey describe the methodology used to
develop our review, clarifying the scope and limits of the article. We then present our ndings, classifying them around three
questions that reect the broader areas of inquiry we found in our review. First, how does raceethnicity affect the perception and
evaluation of leaders? Second, how does raceethnicity affect how leadership is enacted? And nally, how do leaders grapple with
the social reality of raceethnicity? We then discuss broad implications of these ndings for the leadership eld. We end by
applying our insights to propose directions for future research.
2. Literature review
An abundance of literature addresses the theme of race and leadership. Our review included work from leadership studies,
education, management, and some from political science, cultural studies, and gender studies, where appropriate. Table 1
878
Table 1
Summary of sources analyzed and cited in the article.
Empirical
Qualitative
Quantitative
Non-empirical
Analyzed
Cited
52
14
31
9
18
9
8
13
7
5
6
66
14
7
7
5
3
2
2
40
Discipline
Education studies
Leadership studies
Management and organizational development
Political science
Psychology
Racial and ethnic studies
Women's and gender studies
Total empirical
Theory building
Literature review
Analyzed
Cited
76
6
54
5
15
24
3
8
13
14
5
82
8
21
3
0
12
11
4
59
Discipline
Education studies
Leadership studies
Management and organizational development
Political science
Psychology
Racial and ethnic studies
Women's and gender studies
Total non-empirical
Total number of sources analyzed: 148.

Total number of analyzed sources cited in article: 99.
summarizes and describes the sampled studies, including the sources mentioned in this article and the entire sample we reviewed.
A total of 148 sources were identied, reviewed and categorized. Of these, 99 are cited.
Search termsleadership, race, diverse, ethnicity, African American, black, white, Latino, Hispanic, Asian, and colorwere used
both in isolation, and in combination with one another, to screen the relevant scholarship available on a range of academic
databases. We looked at specic journals within the leadership eld, such as The Leadership Quarterly and the International Journal
of Leadership Studies, in addition to databases containing journals across disciplines. These included: ProQuest, Science Direct, ERIC,
PsycInfo, SAGE, JSTOR, and Google Scholar. Identical query terms were used for all of the databases.
The range of disciplines in the analysis provided a variety of frameworks for examining the work of leadership. Among these
disciplines, education and management produced the greatest number of pertinent results. Where the studies were empirical we
focused mostly on those based in the US. Because they offered signicant insights, we included some studies from other English
speaking countries like the UK and Australia, but they were exceptions. The process for selecting and categorizing the studies was
as follows: a team of two research assistants collected and read all the identied references from the rst and second round of
literature searches and created a brief summary of each that was read by the co-authors. Based on these summaries (and in many
cases by their previous knowledge of the article), the co-authors chose 148 pertinent articles and reviewed the full text. The
research team used this review to develop a preliminary classication system which was rened through several iterations into
the framework used here to report our ndings.
Two qualications further clarify the scope of this review. First, we have chosen to focus on raceethnicity while also
acknowledging that this is only one of several relevant and overlapping collective identities to understand social experience. In fact,
research indicates that raceethnicity seldom operates in isolation from other identities such as gender, class, sexual orientation,
nationality, religious preference and so on (Collins, 2005; Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller, & Thomas, 1995; Delgado & Stefancic, 2001;
Richardson & Loubier, 2008). In some cases we address these overlaps by incorporating studies that simultaneously included a focus
on race and gender; but the analytical focus was on the relationship between raceethnicity and leadership.
Second, we decided to largely exclude from this review work from two potentially relevant traditions of scholarship. While we
briey touch on some work on political leadership found in the black leadership scholarly tradition and which is one stream of the
political science literature reviewed, we do not specically include this work in the analysis, because the construct of raceethnicity is
not given analytical primacy within the big tradition and because we were specically interested in leadership within organizations.
The other explicit exclusion is the work on managing or leading diverse teams or organizations, for several reasons. First, with
few exceptions, most of this work does not reference or explore leadership explicitly. (One exception is DiTomaso and Hooijberg,
who argue in their 1996 paper that the diversity literature falls short on the role it sees for leaders in maximizing diversity efforts,
in part because current models of leadership use implicit theories that sanction and perpetuate inequality.) Second, this literature
usually includes many dimensions of diversity, sometimes including race, more often including gender, age, tenure, professional
background and the like. Therefore, much of it is not relevant. In this review we considered only diversity studies focusing solely
on raceethnic diversity and only if they contained a direct reference to leadership or managerial supervision. We did include
studies that focus on the raceethnicity of managers that address the implications for their relationship with employees, since this
represents the most studied formal leader-follower relationship in the literature.
3. Findings on Raceethnicity and Leadership
Our review yielded sources that answered one of three fundamental questions that are implicit or explicit in the scholarship:
How does raceethnicity (of leaders, followers or both) affect perceptions of leadership?
How does raceethnicity affect the ways leadership is enacted? and
How do leaders (and/or followers) grapple with the social reality of raceethnicity?
879
Specic approaches may cut across these categories, but in general, the research clustered well within them, and will be
reviewed accordingly.1 We review the literature in each category below.
3.1. Effects of raceethnicity on perceptions of leadership
The rst set of studies focuses roughly on the questions of how the raceethnicity of the leaders and/or of the followers affect
positively or negativelyperceptions of leadership. Most of these studies try to understand how the raceethnicity of either the
perceiver or the target affects who is authorized to be a leader, as well as how leaders are evaluated or treated. In general, in this
category, scholars view raceethnicity as an independent variable that helps explain how leaders are viewed or experienced. Some
studies explore how the raceethnicity of the leader impacts the way he or she is viewed by followers, while others investigate
how the raceethnicity of followers (or of a general audience that represents potential followers) impacts their view of the leader,
given his or her raceethnicity.
Work in this category stems, for the most part, from an underlying assumption that leaders of color are disadvantaged because,
for various reasons, they are not perceived as legitimate. Some research suggests that perceivers or potential followers are less
likely to authorize people of color as leaders, while other research nds that positional leaders of color, such as managers, may face
challenges to their leadership that white leaders do not.
In either case, however, much of this work sees race as a constraint or obstacle that must be managed because the research has
been done in contexts (usually American or British) where whites are the dominant racial group. In that sense, this research at
least implicitly and sometimes explicitly acknowledges the importance of racial identity as well as the impact of contexts that
include racially-based power inequities. Studies in this category then respond to this context by focusing on how those inequities
translate into constraints placed on individual leaders of color. (The majority of research has compared whites and African
Americans; however more recent research has investigated Latino/a, Asian and Native American leaders as well.) Some studies
have been interested solely in establishing that these obstacles exist, while others have also investigated different explanations for
the disadvantage, as well as the inuence of particular contextual factors that may moderate the effect of race.
3.1.1. Documenting the constraints of raceethnicity
Much of this work draws on quantitative designs that view race as a variable, which can be isolated to assess the extent to
which it has an effect on dependent variables such as performance ratings or perceptions of leadership ability. An early review of
research on black and white leaders (Bartol, Evans, & Stith, 1978) noted that the preponderance of evidence from eld studies
showed black managers were rated more negatively than white managers. However, other studies showed no difference or even,
in one study, that African Americans were rated more positively than whites. The authors also point out that there appeared to be a
difference in what leadership characteristics were given more weight: across the studies, there does appear to be a tendency to
evaluate blacks in leadership positions more heavily on interpersonal factors than on content or task-related factors (p. 298),
though little research at that time investigated why this might be the case. This review article also cites an early study that found
that white subordinates of black managers often act in ways that challenge and undermine their leadership (Richards & Jaffee,
1972; as cited in Bartol et al., 1978), while a large study in 1989 which included both civilian and military employees continued to
nd that both whites and non-whites rated non-white leaders more negatively (Sackett & DuBois, 1991).
More recent lab and survey studies of this kind have also generally found that non-whites are at a disadvantage, though
different kinds of comparisons have been used. Vecchio and Bullis (2001) gathered data from almost 3000 army ofcers and their
subordinates, nding that Hispanic supervisors were rated slightly less positively than non-Hispanics. Knight, Hebl, Foster, and
Mannix (2003) compared white and black managers in an experimental study and found that participants tended to give lower
ratings to black leaders and white subordinates, and higher ratings to white leaders and black subordinates, thus afrming these
workers in their stereotypical societal positions (p. 85). Rosette, Leonardelli, and Phillips (2008) also compared white and black
business leaders in an experimental study, nding that whites were seen as more effective leaders and as having more
leadership potential. Chung-Herrera and Lankau (2005) found that Asians might be advantaged as well as whites: when
participants compared proles of a successful manager to stereotypical proles of managers of different races, they tended to see a
greater correspondence between ratings of white and Asian American managers and the successful manager prototype, compared
with black and Hispanic managers.
Finally, these quantitative studies have been complemented by mixed methods or qualitative research on African American,
Latino and Native American leaders, often women. These document that many from these groups feel they face signicant
obstacles in exercising their authority, though sometimes it is difcult to distinguish the effects of race from the effects of sex. A
study of black managers in education found that they named isolation, lack of professional acceptance and limited networks as
consequences of their race (MacKay & Etienne, 2006). In an extensive study of white and black women managers (Bell & Nkomo,
2001), a number of the African American participants recounted incidents of outright racism as well as more subtle challenges to
1
Two studies by Jung and colleagues have investigated how leadership styles have consequences for leadership outcomes depending on race of the follower
(not the leader), comparing whites and Asians (Jung & Avolio, 1998; Jung & Yammarino, 2001). In the rst Asians generated more ideas than did white students
when working with a transformational leader, while in the second Asian followers felt more collective empowerment than whites, who in turn felt more
individual empowerment. These studies are anomalies that do not t our framework: not being about the race of the leader, they do not t into category 2; not
being about how race of the followers affects perceptions of the leaders, they do not t into category 1. Perhaps the emerging follower-centric perspective to
leadership (Shamir et al., 2007) will stimulate more work of this type, but so far it stands on its own.
880
their authority as well as being held to a higher standard (see chapter 7). Fitzgerald's (2006) cross-national study of indigenous
women educational leaders in New Zealand, Australia and Canada found that they feel marginalized and tokenized, believing that
others were waiting for me to make a mistake, in the words of one participant (p. 208). Latina school superintendents also feel at
a disadvantage according to a study by Mndez-Morse (2003). Thomas and Gabarro's study of the career paths of black and
Hispanic executives showed that, while ultimately successful, they had to log many more years of experience than their white
counterparts before they broke through to the executive suite (Thomas & Gabarro, 1999).
3.1.2. Explaining the constraints of raceethnicity
Many of these studies also investigate or speculate about why these obstacles exist. Bass (1990) cites early studies to suggest
that stress created by marginality is likely to be a constraining effect for black leaders (p. 742), even as he allows that marginality
in some circumstances can be quite benecial. He species that African American managers may lack access to important networks
and appreciation and encouragement from their superiors (p. 743).
The presence of stereotypes and biases is a widely accepted explanation. Mndez-Morse (2003), for example, argues that
Latinas are subject to the stereotype that they are only wives and mothers and dominated by the men in their community. ChungHerrera and Lankau (2005) also name biases and stereotypes as the explanation for their nding that whites and Asians are more
likely to be seen as embodying the prole of a successful manager. Reviewing earlier studies, Bass (1990), on the other hand,
speculates that racial prejudice, a cultural background that stresses modesty and the stereotype of Asians as passive and
retiring may all contribute to the reasons they are not found in management in higher numbers, despite their relatively large
representation in technical and professional elds (p. 754).
Others squarely name racism. Knight et al. (2003), mention aversive racism, a modern form of racism that avoids outright
white supremacy while more insidiously rationalizing white dominance. They argue that it is perhaps the most difcult obstacle
for black managers to overcome (p. 87). Bell and Nkomo (2001) in contrast, name racialized sexism, a particular form of sexism
shaped by racism and racial stereotyping (p. 137) as the basic barrier to advancement for black women managers. While Rosette
and her colleagues (2008) acknowledge the presence of negative racial bias and stereotypes, they believe another mechanism may
also be at play: that being white (that is, race itself rather than stereotypes about race) is part of the business leader prototype
and therefore whites are more likely to be seen as leaders.
Furthermore, many of these studies and others also explore contextual factors that might modify in some way the basic assumption
that leaders of color are handicapped by unfair expectations or evaluations. The most common factor is the race of the perceiver: a
number of scholars suggest that perceivers (or followers) are more likely to authorize leaders from their own racial group or more likely
to rate them favorably. Lee (2008) in fact, argues that in organizational or policy contexts dominated by issues that disproportionately
face people of color, such as child welfare, leaders of color might be more legitimate and more likely to be authorized.
However, the evidence here is mixed. In their review article, Bartol et al. (1978) do suggest an interaction between the ethnic
characteristics of rater and ratee may inuence evaluations with ratees more likely to view leaders of their own race more
positively. Kraiger and Ford (1985) did a meta-analysis of more than 50 studies involving black and white subjects, nding that
whites tended to give higher ratings to whites and blacks to blacks, though these effects were much stronger in the eld than in the
lab. Bass (1990) cites studies with the same conclusion in his review and then directly explores whether poorer evaluations of
black managers and leaders is due to white racial bias; however, he ultimately decides he cannot draw rm conclusions (p. 752)
see also (Bass, 2008, pp. 959961). He also cites one study of Chicano subordinates of white and black managers which found they
gave white managers higher performance ratings than black managers (Bass, 2008, p. 967).
Other studies undermine the notion that followers will more highly rank leaders of their own racial group. Dubey (1970) found
that African Americans are generally indifferent to the race of those holding leadership roles in business or religious
organizations. A large study of black and white managers, subordinates and peers found that black subordinates rated black bosses
more highly than they rated white bosses; however the same effect was not true for whites: white subordinates did not differ in
their ratings of white and black bosses (Mount, Sytsma, Hazucha, & Holt, 1997). Recent lab studies also suggest that same-group
membership is not as predictive as one might think. Rosette et al. found that participants of color (Asian, Hispanic and African
American) also had a bias in favor of white leaders. A study by Ritter, Fischbein, and Lord (2005) found that subordinates of color
were more likely to expect injustice from their managers, regardless of the manager's race.
Others have identied additional factors that could affect how race inuences subordinates' evaluations of superiors. In one
early study, more liberal white subordinates rated their black managers more favorably than less liberal subordinates (Richards &
Jaffee; 1972: as cited in Bartol et al., 1978). In a conceptual paper, Slay (2003) argues that black and white subordinates' positive or
negative reactions will result from the interaction of organizational context and how black leaders manage their own racial
identity. In summary, she suggests African American leaders in majority (predominantly white) contexts who emphasize their
social identication as executives rather than as African Americans are more likely to be seen positively by whites and less
positively by blacks. Those who emphasize their racial identity are more likely to be seen less positively by whites and more
positively by blacks. In minority contexts, however, the opposite dynamic would exist.
Ellis, Ilgen, and Hollenbeck (2006) investigated another possible contingent inuence on ratings of black vs. white leaders:
attributions about team performance. They found no direct effect of race on performance ratings. Instead, team performance and
whether subordinates attribute performance to internal or external factors, inuenced the performance ratings of black and white
leaders.
Finally, Bass posits one nal reason for lower evaluations of African American leaders: their purported lower cognitive ability as
measured on IQ tests and the like (2008, p. 953). While we strongly reject this conclusion, we feel it is important to draw attention
881
to this material in our review. In his fourth edition of the Handbook of Leadership, (2008) Bass begins by noting, without citation or
comment, that only a small percentage of blacks score high on IQ tests, compared with a large percentage of whites. He goes on to
say that [m]ore intellectually demanding jobs tend to employ proportionately fewer blacks, (again without citation or comment)
as another data point apparently attesting to the lower intelligence of African Americans.
He then cites a 1974 review of research which concluded that the lower average job performance of blacks from cognitive
ability tests is accurately predicted from their lower average test scores and goes on to note, The lower scores of blacks than
whites are not due to test biases. In fact, if anything, the job performance of blacks has been overestimated based on their test
results (2008, p. 953). Here he specically rejects the notion that these tests could be racially biased. Later, he notes, 25% of
blacks are still higher in tested intelligence than 50% of whites. Although they may be proportionately fewer than the number of
whites who are available, a substantial number of blacks with the necessary cognitive skills are on hand for positions of leadership
(2008, p. 953). Here he is afrming the notion that fewer blacks are capable of effective leadership, given lower cognitive ability.
Finally, Bass also uses a number of research studies from the 1960s and 70s to describe what he calls the slum subculture and
make other simplistic generalizations about African Americans (2008, p. 954). While Bass also notes that blacks experience greater
stress due to their marginality and acknowledges the existence of racial discrimination (2008, p. 954), this does not begin to
outweigh the damage done by his drawing conclusions based on suspect (and dated) research that denigrates African Americans.
We will return to this in the discussion.
Before concluding this section, we need to reference the extensive work of Hogg (2001) and colleagues on their social
identity theory of leadership which is broadly relevant to discussions of the intersection of race and leadership, though little of
it investigates the effects of raceethnicity, per se. Rather, inuenced by social identity and social categorization theory (e.g.,
Brewer & Gardner, 1996), they argue that most work on leadership overlooks the fact that leaders not only lead groups of
people, but are also themselves members of these groups (Van Knippenberg & Hogg, 2003, p. 244; italics theirs). They suggest
that groups authorize those most prototypical of the group to be their leaders, particularly when group members have strong
group identication.
Empirical research by Hogg and Terry (2000) tends to focus on groups articially formed in the lab. Nevertheless in their
conceptual work they suggest that race and racial groups may prompt similar dynamics. For example, they suggest that
minorities may nd it difcult to attain top leadership positions in organizations because they do not t culturally prescribed
organizational prototypes (p. 130). They also argue that when members identify with a group faced by a social dilemma, they
are more likely to authorize a leader tting the group prototype. However, that would suggest that, for example, African Americans
would be more likely to positively evaluate leaders from their own group which, as we have seen, has not consistently proved true.
In summary, work in this rst category of our framework tends to share several similarities. First, this work sees both race and
leadership as individual characteristics, even while it understands that perceptions and evaluations of individual leaders are
profoundly affected by societal and organizational power inequities that privilege whiteness. It takes an individual-orientation,
which sees race as one of multiple dimensions of identity that individuals possess and that impacts their fate. And it suggests that it
is only individual leadersas opposed to the work of leadershipwho are affected by the racial hierarchy. These individual leaders
then face a lonely and difcult undertaking since they are generally in the minority, must attend constantly to how they are being
assessed, and will have fewer colleagues to whom they can authentically connect.
Second, this category is about leader as target, or the one being perceived. These studies are most concerned with the
perceptions of subordinates or potential followers. Hence the leaders are often construedwhether the researchers meant to do
this or notas the passive recipients of these perceptions, as opposed to active agents that challenge them. However, some of these
studies, as well as other research, suggest that these societal, organizational and individual perceptions also can shape how leaders
of color enact their leadership, including drawing on their raceethnicity as part of their leadership style. This research falls into a
second category of work that examines how race affects the enactment of leadership.
3.2. Effects of raceethnicity on leadership enactments
The second category in our framework addresses the question of how the raceethnicity of the leader affects the ways that he
or she enacts that leadership. As in the rst group, studies in this category tend to view raceethnicity as an independent variable,
but in this case, they tend to emphasize its impact on preferences, styles and behaviors. Unlike the rst category, here the focus is
on the leader, paying less attention to followers, unless one aspect of the enacted leadership is to reach particular audiences,
usually members of the same racialethnic group. Some studies in this category explore how racialethnic identity affects
leadership style. Others, particularly the rich tradition of black leadership scholarship, go further to explore how raceethnicity
affects individuals' construction of the purpose of their leadership.
Work in this area falls into two distinct sub-categories. Quantitative studies, almost all of them from the 1970s, compared the
supervisory styles of white and black managers, as well as whether managers, either explicitly or unconsciously, differentially
supervise employees of different races. Bass has reviewed this work (1990, 2008), so we touch on this relatively briey. Instead
we focus on more recent work, most of it qualitative, which goes beyond seeing raceethnicity as a demographic variable to be
statistically manipulated, to understanding it as something lived and carried out, including in leadership style. Therefore, this
work tends to view raceethnicity as a more complex, uid identity negotiated by a social actor, usually the leader, in ways that
afford some agency to turn this identity into an individual resource. As one researcher notes, leadership is inuenced and
shaped by our own personal and social identity constructions and politics (Dillard, 1995, p. 558). We summarize each subcategory in turn.
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3.2.1. Comparing white and black leadership styles

The research comparing black and white supervisory styles provides few consistent ndings and took place mostly in the
1970s. For example, one study found black participants in a supervisors' training were less likely to suggest use of harsh
punishment than were white participants (Shull & Anthony, 1978; as cited in Bass, 2008). In contrast, an experimental study
showed that white undergraduates playing a supervisor were seen as having greater human relation and administrative skills than
black students in that role (Richards & Jaffee, 1972; as cited in Bass, 1990). Similarly, one study showed black managers were lower
in power motivation (Watson & Barone, 1976; as cited in Bass, 2008), while another found African American supervisors to be
higher in motivation to manage than their white colleagues (Miner, 1977; as cited in Bass, 2008). One study, which stands out
because it was conducted relatively recently (Pitts, 2005), broadly compared school superintendents of color with white
superintendents, hypothesizing that the former would be more empowering of their staff than the latter, but found the opposite
was true. The author speculates that because there are so few superintendents of color, they may feel more vulnerable and
therefore need to exercise greater control.
Much of this research looks at how the race of the manager interacts with the race of his employees (and seems to implicitly or
explicitly presume a male supervisor). Bartol et al. (1978) review research about whether black and white managers supervise
their black and white subordinates differently. They nd little difference: overall, studies concluded that African American
managers are not more considerate with their black subordinates nor are they less directive.
Bass (1990, 2008) however, argues that black managers are likely to be at a disadvantage because they are less likely to be
viewed as legitimate and therefore may enact their leadership differently to address this concern. For example, King & Bass (1974),
as cited in Bass (2008) argued that African American managers would be less directive and more considerate with their white
employees. And, in fact, one study reported that white subordinates found black managers exhibited more consideration than did
white managers (Adams, 1978; as cited in Bass, 2008). King & Bass (1974) also expected that white supervisors would be more
directive with their black subordinates. This was originally supported by a study that found whites were more likely to use
coercion when dealing with their black, as opposed to white, subordinates (Kipnis, Silverman, & Copeland, 1973; as cited in Bass,
2008). However, studies of black and white leaders with mixed racial subordinates show no clear pattern of results.
As a whole, this kind of work is quite similar to the work we reviewed in the rst category: raceethnicity is an individual
characteristic, a xed categorical variable that often acts as a constraint on leaders of color. Further, the vast majority of it is at least
thirty years old, reviewed elsewhere (Bass, 1990, 2008) and, taken as a whole, inconclusive. Therefore, we focus on work in the
second sub-categoryhow leaders of color deliberately and consciously draw on their racial identity to perform their leadership.
This more recent work provides a very different theoretical understanding of the intersection of race and leadership.
3.2.2. Exploring individual raceethnicity as a personal resource
The work of Hogg and colleagues, (e.g., Hogg, 2001; Hogg & Terry, 2000; Van Knippenberg & Hogg, 2003) cited above goes
beyond just investigating the question of how leaders are authorized to considering how those leaders (or those who seek to be
leaders) shape their leadership style in order to be more prototypical. For example, the authors speculate that they will be more
likely to emphasize or heighten their prototypicality by displaying more pronounced group behavior, as well as by showing loyalty
to their group, perhaps by providing favors and opportunities. As noted above, this research operates at a higher degree of
abstraction and generality than the other work in this area, with little empirical work exploring the effect of raceethnicity, per se.
Most of the other relevant articles we found investigated the leadership style of particular racial groups, including Native
Americans, Latinos, Asians and African Americans. Overall, this literature shows how these leaders turn mechanisms of oppression
into effective vehicles for constructive change as one researcher noted (Alston, 2005, p. 677). In fact, while these leaders are
exquisitely aware of the importance of perceptions in a system where race matters, they transform this into strength because they
are attuned to how they are viewed by others (Case, 1997; Dillard, 1995). Another theme across the groups is that non-white
managers and leaders must be bi-culturally uent (Bell, 1990), able to lead in ways that resonate with members of their own
racial-ethnic group but also connect with the dominant ways of working in their white-majority contexts.
Muller (1998) describes this bifurcation as living in two worlds in her study of Native American women managers. Focusing
particularly on the Navajo, she describes the culture as consensus oriented, present- (rather than future-) oriented,
environmentally aware and deeply committed to spirituality, contrasting these qualities with typical Anglo culture. As a result,
these women managers are not brought up to be assertive and competitive which can put them at a disadvantage (p. 12).
However, Muller nds that these women also adopt behaviors that are more in sync with their Anglo-dominated work
environments and therefore use switching techniques to transition and balance between different worlds (p. 22) to negotiate
their lives.
In their description of American Indian managers, Warner and Grint (2006) argue that there is no one way of leading, given the
enormous variation in tribal norms and traditions. However, they do note that Native Americans are less likely to be positional
leaders and, therefore, leadership is more about creating and expanding a sphere of inuence than simply exercising authority.
Inherent in having inuence is the art of persuasion, and the authors describe four different vehicles through which this
persuasion occurs: observation, narrative, experience and tradition. They then identify four different leadership stylesthe social
scientist, the elder, the author and the role modeland describe how each draws more heavily on some kinds of persuasion more
than others.
In her study of women political leaders, Prindeville (2003) compares Native Americans and Latinas in the American state of
New Mexico. She identies both similaritiesvaluing equality, community participation and consensusas well as differences. For
example, she found that issues related to race/ethnicity and cultureindeed the very survival of their cultureseemed to be more
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salient for Native Americans, while gender consciousness was more salient for the Hispaas. Consistent with this point, Pardo
(1998) and Chahin and Rodriguez (2005) emphasize the gender related notions of family and particularly maternal inuence as a
source of leadership in the Latino immigrant community.
Similarly, Latino and black women leaders in the labor movement report overcoming structural hurdles and the unwelcoming
environment characterized by lack of political will to change. They reported self-reliance, diligence, resourcefulness and
gamesmanship to navigate the system. They also used forms of collective leadership and shared responsibilities more consistent
with their cultures. They tapped and developed new social networks to nd the support needed to navigate an institution that
tended to replicate the larger racial-ethnic and gender hierarchies in society (Dickerson, 2006).
An article on Chinese leadership explored how moral leadership, which has received increasing attention, may emerge
naturally from Chinese culture which incorporates inuences of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism (Wong, 2001). All three
traditions have consequences for assumptions about leadership, in particular that China, since Confucius' time, has had a long
history of preparing leaders on moral grounds. (p. 314). The author goes on to note that Chinese philosophers have been more
interested in practical aspects of morality, rather than on more Western traditions of abstract reection. In practice, the kind of
moral leadership embedded in Chinese traditions emphasizes service to the state and to the notion that everyone can succeed.
Wong adapts this latter notion to his particular audience of educational scholars and leaders to argue that all students are capable
of learning.
Altogether, the emphasis on culture adds signicant texture to these scholars' understanding of the effect of raceethnicity on
leadership enactments in various communities of color. Attention to contextual detail tends to focus on identifying contingencies
and factors that inuence leadership styles, downplaying issues of context and power.
Even though the focus of our review is organizational, we highlight here a few examples from the broader literature that
focuses on African American leaders because its emphasis on context and power, we believe, has inuenced recent management
and educational research on black leadership in organizational contexts. Offering cases of well-recognized black leaders from the
1960s, Williams (1998), for example, analyzes the social and economic forces (that) have historically inuenced the tenor, style
and aims of African American leadership (p. 183). Likewise, Walters and Smith's (1999) extended treatise on African American
leadership explores leadership in the political and social arenas. They argue that black leaders are concerned with the collective
interests of people of African descent and that they rely on social rather than economic resources and on coalitional strategies
rather than individual power since they tend to have less of it.
Other African American leadership scholarship emphasizes the variations, recurrent themes and debates that characterize
black social thought and its impact on leadership models through history (Childs, 1989; Marable, 1998). Some scholars focus on
the often unrecognized contributions of women minority leaders to social progress. For example, some work argues that black
women's role in the civil rights movement has much to teach about the leadership that produced the great transformations
associated with this movement (Robnett, 1997).
Work about black leaders in the management discipline focuses on high-level employees in corporate settings. Parker (2001)
and Parker and Ogilvie (1996) provide a detailed framework that focuses on African American women executives in particular.
Drawing on a variety of studies, they argue that these executives' leadership behaviors, such as creativity, risk taking, boundary
spanning and divergent thinking, grow out of their leadership strategies, including biculturalism, avoidance and confrontation.
These strategies are formed in part by the context of these women's leadershipincluding racial and gender discrimination and
devalued leadership ability, and in part by their socialized traits and behaviorsincluding independence, assertiveness, direct
communication and self-condence (p. 192). Bell and Nkomo's (2001) study of black and white women managers found that their
black participants succeeded through perseverance, sassiness, and staying culturally grounded.
A large number of articles address African American leadership in the educational arena. Foster (2005) argues African American
leadership is historical in nature and collaborative in its context and scopeit is integrated in its approach to viewing the student
as a holistic individual who prots optimally from multiple levels of community inuence (p. 692). She draws off work by Walker
and Archung (2003) to describe this leadership style as involving both interpersonal caring and institutional caring and
suggests this caring draws on the input and participation of parents, teachers and principals. Dantley (2005) notes the centrality of
spirituality in African American culture and argues that it should be woven into educational leadership, which would include
welcoming the total self into the educational process and proposing ways to unpack the cultural realities of racism, elitism,
classism and other institutionalized forms of silencing often found in schools (p. 658).
Othermothering, a survival technique from slavery in which mothers take responsibility for the children of other mothers, is
evident in how African American women educators care for their students, according to Case (1997). In the educational context,
othermothering is demonstrated by a commitment to, a compassion for, and an understanding of African American children and
the communities in which they live (p. 36). Dillard (1995) echoes this approach without referencing othermothering explicitly:
[N]urturing and protecting children for African Americans hails from a history of communal responsibility for African children, for
that matter, all children (p. 551).
Murtadha and Watts (2005) see evidence of historical continuity between these contemporary practices and black educators in
earlier periods, especially highlighting the tradition to advocate for students' well being while ghting oppression. Presenting
evidence of coping and resiliency, Pollard (1997) theorizes black urban school principals' historical and contemporary experiences
of resistance to oppression as a key source of leadership. Acknowledging the constraints posed by their social identity, instead of
taking a defensive perspective, these leaders chose to position themselves as individuals who bring a unique contribution to their
role as principals precisely because of their social identity. They actively used it to their advantage in several ways: to help their
students, especially their black students; to mediate between the latter and their predominantly white staff; and to get things
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done with parents, policies and procedures to lead their institutions. These researchers suggest that black leadership work in
education extends far beyond the classroom, into extracurricular work with students, parents and the larger community.
Underlying these and other articles are a number of themes that the authors contend characterize African American
educational leadership. First, these educators have a purpose for their leadership that goes beyond the organization: They work on
behalf of the black community and they are concerned with protecting and transmitting black culture. Second, they have a deep
awareness of the needs of black families; for example they are more likely to be aware of widespread concerns in the African
American community that their children could be taken away by child welfare services (Case, 1997, p. 32). Lomotey (1993) thinks
of these qualities as reective of an ethno-humanist role identity that many African American principals assume. To ensure a good
education of African American students, these principals draw on their insider status and emphasize a distinct black culture
(Tillman, 2004).
However, some articles caution against relying on generalizations about black educators (Lomotey, 1993; Reed & Evans, 2008;
Tillman, 2004). They reect a new generation of scholars that build on the reviewed educational tradition but argue for a more
complex understanding of the role of race and its interaction with other social identities such as gender. They also stress the need
to consider historical conditions that give meaning to the social positions from where people of color enact leadership. We further
review these studies in the last category of our framework.
Overall, like the earlier work we reviewed, this research is about individual leaders, but otherwise it is quite different. This
literature paints a portrait of leaders of color as active agents, drawing on raceethnicity as an individual resource (Roberts, 2005).
As Alire (2001) documents, some ethnic leaders' advice is to rely on their traditional cultural heritages and the extent of their life
experiences, as minorities, to help them lead. This provides extra resources and enriched insight to confront challenges, as the
obstacles faced within a white society teaches them the courage to act (p. 101). Here, what is viewed as a constraint in
mainstream leadership is shifted into becoming a source of strength and inuence. Followers, so critical in the rst category, are
only obliquely present in most of the research in this category. Generally, it is assumed that followers will value these different
leadership styles, especially if they are from same raceethnicity group as the leader.
Further, most of the research in this category shares a similar point of departure: a critique of the cultural bias in traditional
leadership theories (Bordas, 2007; Wong, 2001) and an acknowledgement that context matters in leadership research (Jansen,
2005). All of the writings that explore individual racial groups do so in order to construct a more capacious and multi-faceted
image of what leadership looks like. They point to bodies of knowledge located at the periphery that are worth exploring
(Fitzgerald, 2006). They highlight the importance of studying leaders who come from non-mainstream cultures and who have had
different life experiences, because of their minority status. Because culture informs leadership style, some argue that minority
leadership surfaces new approaches to leadership that offer additional tools for the leader's toolkit in the new contexts of
increased complexity and diversity (Bordas, 2007). In particular, some of this work suggests that there are already groups and
communities enacting the more collaborative, non-heroic style of leadership that is currently receiving so much attention.
For studies in this category raceethnicity is both a constraint and a resource that, when salient in the environments social
actors navigate, inuences leadership. It is however, something that belongs to the leader, who may decide to use it or not, for
personal survival and advancement or for community wellbeing and social change. Studies in the next category build on this
tradition to further emphasize the collective dimensions of this resource.
3.3. Grappling with the social reality of raceethnicity
The third category seeks to understand how social actorsleaders and/or followersgrapple with the reality of raceethnicity as
it manifests in their environment. Here raceethnicity is treated not only or exclusively as an individual characteristic. It is also a
social or political issue with personal and collective meaning, which may become salient within the context in which leadership
happens. The direction of causality is less clear than it is in the other two categories. Rather than strictly an independent variable,
raceethnicity inuences the context and is, in turn, shaped by it. In some cases, where raceethnicity is viewed as a social
construction, it becomes the equivalent to a dependent variable. Studies in this category explore not only how leaders respond to
an environment where raceethnicity is salient, but how they explicitly make it more salient as part of their leadership work.
Studies in this category thus treat raceethnicity as a social reality that colors and constructs perceptions, interactions and
relationships. This approach builds in part on previous work on race in organizations which may not reference leadership per se,
but provides a strong theoretical foundation for understanding how race, sometimes invisibly, permeates organizational life,
including leadership (Alderfer & Smith, 1982; Bell, 1990; Cox & Nkomo, 1990; Nkomo, 1992; Thomas, 1989; Thomas & Proudford,
1999).
Scholars exploring leadership from this perspective take for granted that raceethnicity can be a constraint affecting leaders'
and followers' fates and behaviors. But they understand that it is also a personal resource drawn on through strategic choices that
inuence attributions or address collective interests. They recognize the relevance of culturally-grounded leadership styles. These
acknowledgements are, however, points of departure to explore how social actorsbe they leaders or followersgrapple with
raceethnicity as a reality that infuses specic meanings in concrete social contexts.
While acknowledging the existence of race-based inequalities, not all of this work explicitly incorporates a power analysis in
their treatment of raceethnicity. This category therefore includes two sub-categories. Scholars in the mainstream leadership
tradition, particularly from a social psychological viewpoint, emphasize how collective dimensions of social identity inuence
leaders' and follower's behaviors; in other words, exploring collective identity as a personal resource (Hogg, 2001; Kark & Shamir,
2002; Shamir, House, & Arthur, 1993). But the connection between power and identity is taken as a given, rather than as a factor to
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incorporate in the analysis. Scholars from other elds emphasize leaders' response to an external environment where race
ethnicity is inuential and, ubiquitous, resulting in systemic inequities (Evans, 2007; Kezar, 2000; Ospina & Su, 2009). They make
power dynamics central to the analysis.
3.3.1. Exploring collective identity as personal resource
Social identity theory scholars as well as neo-charismatic leadership scholars underscore the role of collective identity. Hogg
(2001) and his associates' (e.g., Abrams & Hogg, 1990) leadership theory is very much about what happens to leadership when
race and other identities are in the context, thus we review here this dimension of their work. In this theory, perceptions,
evaluations and endorsements of leadership are highly inuenced by context specic, multidimensional fuzzy sets of attributes
that dene and prescribe attitudes, feelings, and behaviors typical and distinct (or prototypical) from group to group (Hogg, 2001,
p. 187; italics ours).
Social minorities, the theory argues, will most likely encounter obstacles in contexts that render them intrinsically less
prototypical than majorities (Hogg, 2001, p. 195). As indicated before, in this theory minorities can use raceethnicity as a
strategic resource. Slay (2003) for example, suggests that emerging African American leaders will choose how to identify
themselves and others according to the organizational context they navigate, particularly whether they work in a so-called
minority or a majority rm.
Social identity leadership theories thus implicitly acknowledge racial hierarchies and unequal power dynamics, while race
ethnicity is viewed as both personal and collective, in that individuals make choices about managing their own racial identity in
part due to the nature of raceethnicity in their context. But context is generally conceived in narrow terms, referring to the
demographic make-up of their immediate surroundings rather than taking into account socially and historically embedded racial
dynamics that make these decisions much more complex.
If in social identity theory leaders manage their identity to navigate a contested organizational experience, studies in the neocharismatic tradition shift the focus to how leaders manage the social identity of their followers. The emphasis moves to the
leader-follower relation as it occurs within particular circumstances, and a broadened interest in social context. In this theory,
leaders nurture social identity characteristics of their followers to motivate them to do things that they would not otherwise have
done (Shamir et al., 1993; Shamir, Zakay, Breine, & Popper, 1998). Shared and collective identities are key mechanisms to induce
followers to transcend their personal interests and perform beyond expectations (Conger, Kanungo, & Menon, 2000; Lord &
Brown, 2004; Lord, Brown, & Feiberg, 1999; Shamir et al., 1993; Shamir et al., 1998).
This tradition does not include empirical studies of raceethnicity. Yet race is mentioned to illustrate how symbolic and
expressive efforts help the follower to nd intrinsic value and meaning at work. Shamir and his associates (1993) state:
Charismatic leaders may use existing identities and emphasize their uniqueness or superiority (black is beautiful), or they may
create new desirable social categories for the followers (the master race). In both cases, the self-concepts of the followers are
clearly engaged. (p. 582). Leaders prime or activate the collective level of the self-concept of followers to engage them in shared
identities, that in turn trigger motivational forces for performance (Kark & Shamir, 2002; Shamir et al., 1993, Shamir et al., 1998),
including increasing the likelihood of self-sacricial, collective-oriented behavior (Shamir et al., 1993, p. 582). Raceethnicity is
thus a dimension of the collective self, which belongs simultaneously to the individual (as being black) and to the work group (as
in being part of a community of practice).
Building on these notions, Lord et al. (1999) propose that leaders can prime different levels of the followers' self-concept to
change conditions such as followers' self perceptions, degree of identication with the leader and willingness to make
commitments to the group rather than for the self. In later work Kark & Shamir (2002) differentiate between leader behaviors that
prime the relational self (and help followers bond with the leaders) and those that prime the collective self (and foster
identication with the unit). Strategies mentioned include symbolic, verbal and performance acts (slogans, rituals, labels,
metaphors, ceremonies and communication strategies that emphasize the we); emphasizing common ground; and generating a
shared identity by linking shared values and ideologies to tasks and goals (Kark & Shamir, 2002, p. 80).
Neo-charismatic scholars emphasize the cultural dimensions of context and the self-expressive and collective aspects of both
identity and leadership. There is not, however, an equivalent emphasis on the power dynamics of organizational life. The highly
contested and racialized hierarchies are either taken for granted or ignored. Moreover, further elaborations of the theory seem to
have focused on gender (Kark, 2004) leaving empirical work on raceethnicity unattended.
3.3.2. Introducing power to connect collective meanings of raceethnicity and leadership
Reviewed studies so far emphasize the impact of the collective dimensions of social identity on behavior. Scholars reviewed
below emphasize leaders' response to an external environment where race is inuential and affects people's fate. These studies
argue that the personal and collective meaning of raceethnicity is always present and ubiquitous, even if it is not always salient to
everyone in the environment. Raceethnicity affects leaders, followers, their relationship and the context where leadership
happens: racial meanings inuence how we comprehend, explain and act in the world (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001; Omi & Winant,
1994). They construct the social context, as well as our individual identities.
Work in this category tends to be inuenced by constructs from Critical Race Theory, a scholarship that draws on legal studies
and social theory to explore phenomena like racism, racial subordination and discrimination (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001; Nagel,
2000; Nkomo, 1992; Omi & Winant, 1994; Valdes, McCristal Culp, & Harris, 2002; Yosso & Solorzano, 2005).
Most studies in this category start with the premise that raceethnicity not only shapes individuals' psychological makeup and
their relationships, but is also intrinsically part of their collective identities and of the larger social structures and representations
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of the world within which leadership emerges. In this view, a reciprocal causal mechanism operates: social structure shapes
individuals' experience of race and conditions its meanings; at the same time, these interpretations shape how individuals relate to
the institutions and organizations which imbed them in social structure (Omi & Winant, 1994, p. 60). Raceethnicity constructs
individuals and individuals construct raceethnicity. The racial sensemaking that emerges from these dynamics contributes to
both reproduce and challenge the processes that create inequality, such as racism, subordination, discrimination and segregation
(Delgado & Stefancic, 2001; Yosso & Solorzano, 2005). This critical lens emphasizes the relevance of considering power when
studying the relationship between raceethnicity and leadership.
Some studies, mostly in the educational leadership eld, bring power dynamics fully into the analysis. They focus on the
response of leaders to rapid demographic change (Evans, 2007), explore responses to racialized environments through leadership
enactments (Kezar, 2000; Loder, 2005; Lomotey, 1993; Tillman, 2004) or challenge interpretations of these enactments based on
one single identity marker like race (Reed & Evans, 2008). Other studies, in management, document explicit efforts to shape
representations of raceethnicity in these environments (Foldy, Goldman, & Ospina, 2008; Ospina & Su, 2009). We discuss each of
these approaches below.
Evans (2007) studied the sense-making of principals in three suburban high schools with the racial majority of students
shifting from white to African American. In-depth interviews of faculty and staff reveal that independent of race, the principal with
a positive view of diversity was more likely to engage in afrmative forms of sense-making around emerging racial issues. This
principal also allocated more time and resources to addressing the issues proactively. In contrast, the two race-neutral principals
were reluctant to recognize underlying tensions, reacting only to overt conict. Evans concludes that effective school leaders in
racially diverse institutions must see race, acknowledge the various sociopolitical manifestations of racism, and recognize their
own dominance or marginalization of others (p. 184).
A distinctly black perspective on leadership, some argue, can be linked to African American principals' awareness of social
exclusion dynamics which affect the educational experience of their community. As reviewed earlier, Lomotey (1993) contrasts
the role of black principals as bureaucrat/administrators, primarily attending to student academic success and to overall school
effectiveness, with the role of ethno-humanists, more concerned with the individual life chances of their students and with the
overall improvement of the status of African American people (p. 396).
Lomotey notes that not all black principals play both critical roles. Yet Tillman (2004) does nd sufcient evidence of this black
cultural approach in her thorough review of the literature on leadership roles of African American principals before and after the
Brown v. Board of Education decision. Many, though certainly not all black principals, did embody Lomotey's (1993) ethnohumanist role identity. They were highly committed to black students, condent in their intellectual ability and compassionate to
them and their families. In addition to Lomotey, Tillman (2004) cites three studies whose authors nd that black principals
practice leadership drawing heavily from the distinctive black culture [the reviewed studies were: Siddle Walker (1993), Dillard
(1995), and Bloom and Erlandson (2003)].
These studies describe a complex social context that leads the analyst to explore the combined impact of micro and macro
power dynamics on leadership. Because the principals' leadership was embedded in a system of unequal power relations, the use
of black culture was a strategic response to a complex social reality rather than an automatic reection of cultural preferences.
Black principals often resisted an oppressive white power structure (Tillman 2004, p. 133) as they tried to educate black
children: They fought against theories of inferiority, funding structures that disadvantaged black students, the emphasis on
vocational over academic preparation, and the displacement of massive numbers of black teachers and principals (p. 132). These
principals' purposive use of culture aimed both to counter a social message of racial subordination and to offer an equitable
education for African American children, given a reality of inequality despite the larger reforms associated with desegregation.
Leadership work was meant not only to educate but to ensure the perpetuation of African American culture in the context of
strong opposition and extremely adverse conditions that threatened to eliminate it (Tillman, 2004).
These racialized social realities inuenced school principals' leadership styles, their relationship to teachers, parents and
students, the purpose of their leadership and how they constructed meanings to mobilize relevant stakeholders to accomplish the
job. Leadership work included capitalizing on the rich cultural and symbolic resources drawn from the deep well of the African
American community to grapple with the negative effects of discrimination and inequality in their schools.
Given these strategic adjustments, it is clear that leadership enactments were not the same among all principals. Scholars in
other educational contexts who also view leadership enactments as responses to racialized environments point to the variations in
the leadership that emerges in such contexts. For example, Kezar (2000) nds three different constructions of leadership in an
urban community college campus where race was salient. She documents how these were associated with power conditions such
as history of relationships, differential allocation of resources, salary arrangements, and collective bargaining processes (p. 740).
She thus draws attention to the intimate linkages between race and power and to their unique impact on leadership work.
Some scholars do take note and explicitly caution against generalizations about black educational leaders in studies that only
consider race. For example Reed and Evans (2008) critique two assumptions behind the idea of a blanket black cultural approach
to leadership. Firstthat all African American leaders have different values and attitudes from white leaders and that they will
tend to empathize with black students, and secondthat all female black leaders are more nurturing than other leaders. They
provide an extended analysis of one African American woman principal of a virtually all black school, to demonstrate how she does
not generally conform to either of these viewpoints.
They argue that race will not always trump other identities and issues in black educators' practice. These scholars take to heart
the notion of intersectionality (Richardson & Loubier, 2008) to locate raceethnicity within a broader spectrum of multiple and
overlapping identities. According to this theoryrace, class, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, ability, and other markers of
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difference intersect in unique ways to inuence how human beings interpret their experiences, including power conditions, and
how they react to them. These scholars claim it is the uidity of African American identity which shapes these educators'
leadership orientation towards their students and schools (p. 497). Loder's study (2005) illustrates the impact of this
intersectionality on the leadership work of African American women principals. Awareness of the power dynamics associated with
school conditions motivated them to strategically adjust their leadership work. Yet she nds that it was specically the
intersections of race, gender and generational status that contributed to shape their role perceptions and interpretations of urban
school reform.
The debate about the role of black culture should be incorporated in leadership research. When raceethnicity is part of the
research agenda, an empirical exploration of how the intersection of identities inuences the choices that leaders of color make is
important in describing the contextual dimensions of leadership. It also points to the paramount role of social context, which is not
just relevant background to understand leadership, but is instead where people construct their understandings of both their
racialized identity and their experience of leadership, be it from a leader or a follower perspective.
In sum, studies that explicitly link individual dilemmas to broader structures and their cultural representations aim to explore
the rich cultural milieus where collective meanings of raceethnicity, largely inuenced by structures of power, play a signicant
role in shaping leadership. They illuminate how the constraints imposed by raceethnicity are transformed into individual and
collective resources that can be used in the work of leadership to shape meanings, representations and even power relations. By
doing so, these studies implicitly emphasize the collective dimensions of leadership. This approach to leadership, however, does
not represent a deliberate theoretical strategy to inuence the leadership eld, but rather a strategy to understand leadership in
particularly rich contexts.
3.3.3. Capitalizing on converging theoretical developments
The increasing inuence of critical race theory on the reviewed studies of raceethnicity and leadership highlights the uid and
collective dimensions of this social identity, and its implications to understanding leadership. This is converging with recent
developments in the leadership literature that invite attention to the relational, constructed and collective dimensions of
leadership work. This emergent scholarship attends to the collective nature of the leader-follower relationship (Collinson, 2005;
Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995; Shamir et al., 2007), to more distributed and dispersed forms of leadership (Fletcher & Kaufer, 2003;
Pearce & Conger, 2003), as well as to the organizing, meaning-making and communicative processes that constitute the substance
of leadership (Drath, 2001; Fairhurst, 2007; Hosking, 2007; Ospina & Sorensen, 2006).
Scholars interested in the collective dimensions of leadership have started to explicitly explore the association between
leadership and raceethnicity in ways that capitalize on the implications of the described convergence. Foldy et al. (2008),
drawing on neo-charismatic approaches as well as social movement theory, empirically demonstrated how social change leaders
attempt to shape the racial and ethnic identities of their followers; for example, by encouraging them to identify with a
marginalized cultural identity from which they had previously distanced themselves.
Ospina and Su (2009) dug more deeply into how leadership shapes raceethnicity by asking how participants in social change
organizations understand and approach issues of race to advance their work. Using narratives from 22 social change organizations
and building six in-depth cases, they document three distinct means of constructing race: interweaving narratives from multiple
race-ethnic groups, drawing off time-honored cultural traditions and creating understandings of self through reection on
racialized lived experience. They suggest that these means of understanding race moved the work forward by, respectively,
building a sphere of interdependence, developing organizational strength and transforming individuals. In turn, these three
outcomes helped organizations leverage the power needed to sit at the policy table or inuence those capable of addressing the
community's problems and aspirations.2
In summary, like in the second category, studies in the third category of our framework portray leaders of color as active agents
who draw on their raceethnicity as a resource. However, unlike those in the second category, these leaders emphasize the
collective dimension of raceethnicity, and in some instances, link them to the collective dimensions of leadership. As the
collective side of both phenomena is emphasized, it becomes more evident that the personal efforts or strategic choices of leaders
in racialized contexts represent merely the most visible part of a broader collective process that unfolds over time and that must be
uncovered empirically. By increasingly understanding leadership as embedded in context, and empirically exploring the
implications, research linking race to leadership in this category offers several examples of ways to open the black box of the how
of leadership.
4. Discussion
As we hope we have demonstrated, raceethnicity in general and the experiences and narratives of people of colorboth as
leaders and as followersin particular, have garnered signicant attention over time. Yet we observe an intriguing
discontinuity: as mainstream leadership work on race has plateaued, other interesting work on race and leadership is being
2
It is worth noting that this research approximates social movement scholars' renewed interest in culture, identity, and the micro-dynamics of movement
work, but bringing a leadership perspective. Polletta and Jasper (2001) for example, point to the historical construction of what seem like natural identities
such as black and invite more research to better understand the role of this process to advance movement goals. This represents another potential area of
convergence, and future research based on common assumptions could yield positive results.
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done within education, communication, black studies and other management domains outside leadership studies. This work
offers important insights about the leadership experience and about context-rich research approaches that treat race in its full
complexity. At the same time, some of the insights from these studies appear to remain marginal to the extant literature. We
rst explore this discontinuity to set the stage for our discussion of the broader implications of our review for leadership theory
and future research.
4.1. A discontinuity in theory building
Early leadership scholars tended to explore how the raceethnicity of leaders and their subordinates affects their performance
ratings (for a summary, see Bass, 1990, 2008). Both raceethnicity and leadership were viewed as relatively xed attributes that
belonged to individual actors, independent of the context where they were embedded. Developing a more nuanced understanding
of context, later work underscored the role for leadership theory of social identities and their cultural representations. The power
analysis introduced in some studies offered more complex portraits of the work of leadership by incorporating the notion that
identities are resources actors use to obtain social goals (Williams, 2007, p. 93).
Acknowledging racialized contexts, some scholars explored the relationship between race and leadership by giving primacy to
the experience of people of color and to their perspective of the world. They took a stance that sees the experiences of both
researchers and the leaders of color they study as located within power-infused environments where uid social identities inform
people's understanding of who they are vis--vis the institutions they inhabit (an approach called standpoint research) (Parker,
2001). Some scholars complicated this by viewing raceethnicity as part of a broader spectrum of multiple and overlapping
identities whose combination informs experience (called intersectionality) (Richardson & Loubier, 2008). These studies linked
these complex realities to leadership styles, behaviors and practices, thus offering a different perspective on the work of leadership
and how it unfolds over time and in context.
However, our review suggests that these perspectives remain separate from the mainstream leadership tradition and are often
ignored or dismissed as a source of theorizing. Indeed, some scholars have suggested that insights based on the study of non-white
groups are less likely to permeate the knowledge base of what is traditionally viewed as the leadership studies eld (Calas, 1993;
Landson-Billings, 2000; Murtadha & Watts, 2005; Tillman, 2004). There may be a number of dynamics at play here.
First, this invisibility may come from different ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions, that is, from
different understandings about the nature of the social world, how we can know it and how we can study it (Crotty, 1998). For
example, standpoint research demands privileging an outsider within perspective (Harding, 2004; Parker, 2001; Weis & Fine,
2004) that relies on narrative and phenomenological methods, placing the experience of leaders of color in particular contextsfor
example African American school leaders or corporate managersat the center of the inquiry rather than at the margins (Tillman,
2004, p. 104). To illustrate, an entire section of Chin, Lott, Rice, & Sanchez-Hucles's (2007) edited book, Women and Leadership, is
devoted to bringing from margin to centerthe voices of diverse feminist leaders. Several chapters review literature on the
leadership experiences of Latina, African American, Asian American, American Indian women with disabilities (and also of lesbian
feminists).
The assumptions and standards of quality of research in these methodologies, however, clash with dominant denitions of
research in western scientic discourse that encourage validity standards based on an objective, distant stance toward the
research subjects (Crotty, 1998; Landson-Billings, 2000). This has practical implications. For example, scholars of educational
leadership argue that in a eld dominated by white administrators, ndings from a minority insider's perspective are regarded as
dubious and unlikely to be published in professional journals (Bloom & Erlandson, 2003, p. 344; as cited in Tillman, 2004, p. 125).
Hence, the perspective of an important group of leaders with relevant experience and expertise is unrecognized and excluded
from policy and educational reform debates.
Second, the nature of traditional leadership theory and research itself assumes a generic relevance of western ideas (House &
Aditya, 1997; Landson-Billings, 2000; Lumby, 2006). This is reected both in the preference for positivist methodologies and in
dominant denitions of leadership. Partly as a result, traditional leadership theory has tended to operate with color-blind or
gender-blind assumptions (Collinson, 2005; DiTomaso & Hooijberg, 1996). Indeed, existing leadership theories have taken those
in positions of formal authority for granted (usually white people, often men) as the standard social identity referent in leadership
scholarship (Tillman, 2004). Even recent work that explores collective and shared forms of leadership (e.g. Ford & Seers, 2006;
Hiller et al., 2006; Pearce & Sims, 2002) is largely color-blind.
The impact on the eld of removing raceethnicity and gender from the study of leadership is doubly negative. First, it makes
western perspectives and whiteness the default categories to measure the leadership experience of people from any race
ethnicity. This means that we lose a full recognition of the leadership experience of both non-white leaders who tend to be
dismissed and white leaders whose race is unseen. Ignoring whiteness as a social category with its own social meanings reduces
our ability to understand leadership in largely white contexts where racial-ethnic dynamics are less obvious, though nevertheless
present (Frankenberg, 1993). As a consequence, our understanding of the racialized and gendered leadership experience of all
individuals is incomplete.
For example, the literature on women's leadership, which draws on insights from feminist research and gender studies, often
notes that one reason women are at a disadvantage is that traditionally they were relegated to the private sphere of the home,
rather than the public sphere of the workplace. But black women rarely had the luxury to work solely in their own house; instead
they have traditionally labored long hours working outside their home, both during slavery and in the many decades since.
Therefore, it is less likely that black women would be disadvantaged by the stereotype that their place is in running their own
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home and raising their own children. But when researchers write about women and leadership, they implicitly refer to white
women, rarely distinguishing between the experiences of white women and black women or between the different types of
stereotypes they are subject to: in other words, white women tend to avoid a racialized lens.
Whether using a standpoint perspective or a traditional approach to its subjects, leadership research about people of color
becomes seen as atypical, and its cases have not contributed to the generalized ndings of research. Reecting a broader tendency
in the social sciences (Williams, 2001, 2007), leaders and followers of color are seldom treated as paradigmatic humans who
can serve as the source of datato develop theories about the human condition (Williams, 2001, p. 1). The tendency to treat
people of color as non-paradigmatic represents a missed opportunity for theorizing about leadership. Building on black feministstandpoint theory, Parker (2001) argues that black women have created knowledge about leadership that historically has been
ignored or devalued (p. 48) and thus leadership theory can be enhanced by placing them at the center of analysis.
A second problem with a color-blind approach is the isolation of important insights from mainstream leadership research.
Embedded in different disciplines, studies of raceethnicity and leadership are separated into silos with invisible walls that are
hard to cross. This situation is illustrated by the scant inuence of the large scholarship in African American political leadership
(Walters & Johnson, 2000) and African American educational leaders (Tillman, 2004) on the received knowledge of the US
mainstream leadership studies eld.
It is not our role to state whether this treatment is intentionalto render invisible the otheras some critical management
scholars suggest (Calas, 1993), or whether it is an unfortunate oversight from scholars in the eld. Yet the result is an approach
that inhibits the understanding of the experience of people of color and reduces their important contributions to the theory and
practice of leadership (Gordon, 2000; Murtadha & Watts, 2005; Parker, 2001; Tillman, 2004). As the scholars offering this
argument conclude, the received literature has tended to obscure logics and practices of leadership that may be different from
the conventional ones (Calas, 1993; Murtadha & Watts, 2005), thus diminishing considerably our capacity to understand
leadership in its full complexity.
In the worst-case scenario, the received leadership literature may offer distorted or questionable knowledge about the
relationship between race and leadership that can be detrimental to the eld and to the referenced identity groups. This is the case
with the chapter reviewing the role of race in Bass's fourth edition of The Handbook of Leadership (2008).3 Our discussion suggests
that unless leadership scholars raise their awareness and develop a deep, social science-based theoretical conceptualization of the
construct of race, they may contribute to perpetuate stereotypes and use material as evidence that reproduces racist discourses
and representations. But even espousing a so-called color-blind approach that negates the impact of racialized environments and
discourses on the experience of leadership is problematic. By doing so, the eld may not only ignore but diminish the experience of
people of color in its treatment of the relationship between race and leadership.
In summary, despite this possibility, there is a solid record of systematic research on the role of raceethnicity on leadership,
however, a large part of it has remained marginal to extant theory. Most leadership theory implicitly or explicitly claims to be
identity-neutral and thus does not consider insights from studies that take an insider perspective, or incorporate generalizations
from research about people of color. Our review represents an effort to integrate these insights and to explore their implications
for leadership theory and research.
4.2. Toward an integrated framework of knowledge about race and leadership

We found that the categories inherent in the three questions that the scholarship has tried to address can be arranged in three
concentric circles, where the rst category is embedded in the second and both are embedded in the third, as depicted in Fig. 1. We
contend that this framework offers a cumulative progression of insights about raceethnicity and leadership. Each circle holds a
set of core assumptions that make it unique, but some of the assumptions of the rst category still inuence the second, and some
of the rst and second still inform the third. At the same time, internal variations within each category suggest subcategories inside
each larger circle, though studies within each circle hold sufcient commonality to differentiate them. This framework thus
integrates emergent insights previously generated in silos, so as to offer new ways of theorizing about leadership.
In the rst category, raceethnicity is seen largely as a constraint because of the marginalization and signicant
disempowerment of people of color. Work in the second category recognizes these dynamics, but documents how leaders of
color respond to and often rise above those constraints through their own agency, transforming raceethnicity into a resource. In
the third category, raceethnicity is even more uid, and the emphasis moves from its individual to its collective dimension. In this
outermost circle, social identity is both constraint and resource, used by the leader or collectively, according to circumstances,
purposes and meanings.
As we move outward through these concentric circles several ingredients build our understanding of the complex relationship
between raceethnicity and leadership. First, a treatment of context gradually shifts from simple to complex. Second, the
treatment of context gradually incorporates a more explicit analysis of power dynamics in understanding how raceethnicity and
leadership connect, thus increasingly linking micro and macro levels of analysis. Third, as a corollary of the two previous shifts,
3
It is possible that Bass's unanticipated death contributed to the situation described in our review and mentioned in this discussion. Perhaps had he been able
to continue to edit and polish the Handbook at his own pace, he would have had the opportunity to assess the quality and content of the collected material for
the chapter in question, and, further think through the implications of including this material, particularly without comment or critique. The unfortunate
outcome given the circumstances of its publication, however, must be mentioned in a review that aims at exploring the way the leadership eld has treated race,
particularly given the Handbook's impact on the eld.
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Fig. 1. An integrated framework of insights about raceethnicity and leadership.
there is a shift in the role of agency and structure in understanding the associations between raceethnicity and leadership. Fourth,
the categories vary in terms of how scholars see the direction of causation, from race as an independent variable, to a dependent
variable, to a situation of reciprocal causality.
While these ingredients are very much interrelated, for analytical purposes we will briey explore each and their implications
in relation to extant leadership theory and research practices. These four shifts also reect a gradual convergence between theories
of raceethnicity and theories of leadership, with a more uid characterization of raceethnicity and more emphasis on the
relational, collective dimensions of leadership. We will discuss this convergence as appropriate when addressing each shift.
4.2.1. From simple to complex considerations of context
Moving outward through the circles, context gradually shifts to nally consider the individual and collective dimensions of
both social identity and leadership. This also entails a gradual shift from studies that attempt to control for characteristics of the
context or explore contingencies, to those that incorporate nuanced dimensions of the social, cultural and structural milieus
affecting leadership, to nally those that view context as the raw material from which leadership emerges and thus as constitutive
of both raceethnicity and leadership.
Context represents a key construct in leadership theories (Biggart & Hamilton 1987; Kets de Vries, 2001), particularly for
contingency theorists (Fiedler, 1967) and transformational leadership scholars (Beyer, 1999; Bryman et al., 1996). The eld
highlights the need to consider the interconnections between leadership and the circumstances and conditions from which it
emerges (Alvesson, 1996; Bryman, Stephens, & Campo, 1996; Osborn et al., 2002; Parry & Bryman, 2006). Yet, despite strong
arguments for its relevance, systematic attention to organizational context in the literature is still scant and poor (Porter &
McLaughlin, 2006). Context takes the form of moderating factors like organizational structure, culture, goals, strategy,
demographics, and so on (Jackson & Parry, 2008), or of environments where leaders' decisions are staged, from stable
environments to the edge of chaos (Osborn et al., 2002). Placed in the background, these are assumed to exist prior to leadership
(Ospina & Hittleman, forthcoming). The leader's traits, styles, behaviors, tasks, or roles in relation to the followers (or to followers'
response to leaders, in follower-centered approaches) are studied in the foreground, considering the identied background
characteristics.
Our review suggests that increased considerations of raceethnicity as a uid social phenomenon guide the analyst to add
texture and nuance to explorations of leadership in context. For example, capitalizing on the theoretical convergence described
earlier, Ospina and Su (2009) considered how raceethnicity infused meaning into the social context which was used to advance
social change work. Because the policy contexts where the work was embedded were highly racialized, information about them
was not just supplemental background data, but the raw material from which to explore how leadership emerged.
A more uid view of identity has also informed traditions like social cognition, neo-charismatic and transformational
leadership, whose scholars distinguish individual, interpersonal and collective levels of identity (Hogg, 2001; Kark & Shamir, 2002;
Lord & Brown, 2004). Nevertheless, the treatment of context largely remains quite narrow or simplistic. Hogg's social identity
theory would hypothesize that in a diverse environment people would look for the prototype of whatever group identity was
salient. However, in such environments, multiple identities are likely to be salient. Assuming one salient group identity and one
dominant prototype suggests an impoverished view of the complexity of today's organizations.
Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, Hogg's theory assumes that people in subordinate groups will look for their own
prototype as opposed to being inuenced by the broader social context to value the dominant prototype. Yet members of
subordinate groups may come to internalize the devaluation of their group and truly believe that individuals who embody the
dominant prototype would make better leaders. They could also simply believeprobably unconsciouslythat characteristics of
that dominant prototype are part of what a leader looks like. Indeed, Rosette et al. (2008) demonstrates that employees of all races
see whiteness as part of the leadership schema, a point that challenges the work of Hogg and colleagues (e.g., Hogg, 2001; Hogg &
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Terry, 2000; Van Knippenberg & Hogg, 2003). Finally, employees might believe that they will be better served by someone
prototypical of the dominant group, given power inequities in the environment. For example, employees of color might believe it
would be better to have a white manager than one of color since whites may have stronger networks and greater access to
resources. Consistent with this simplistic view of context, considerations of power in the theory are not fully developed.
4.2.2. From acknowledging power to a power analysis
Moving outward in the framework's circles we see a shift from implicit acknowledgments of power, to deliberate
considerations of unequal power relations at the micro and macro levels of analysis.
Research on black leadership in school contexts (e.g, Lomotey, 1993; Reed & Evans, 2008; Tillman, 2004) illustrates the benets
of incorporating a power analysis. This work offers exemplars of rich, textured understandings of how leaders constructed their
leadership and made sense with parents, teachers and students of an adverse environment characterized by blatant inequalities
disadvantaging the black community. The debate around the risks of over-generalizing around race per Reed & Evans' discussion
(2008) makes clear that the use of culture in the work of leadership cannot be just assumed, but instead, must be unpacked
through systematic empirical research that names race and acknowledges the power dynamics surrounding it.
The debate also underscores the promise of exploring how the intersection of identities like race, gender and professional roles
inuences the choices school leaders made. Black principals' culturally rooted leadership enactments are explained less as a
function of personal preferences associated with their black identity, and more as the product of the combined effect of uid
identities inuencing their interpretations and reactions.
This contrasts with leadership studies described in the second circle of our framework, where culture shaped a distinct
leadership style and transformed identity into a personal resource. Culture was assumed to cover all individuals who shared the
same identity, an assumption that must be tested empirically, as indicated above. Similarly, in the transformational and neocharismatic studies reviewed in the third circle, the simplied role assigned to cultural values to prime a salient collective identity
ignores that the collective self reects a social context pervaded by power dynamics.
Empirical work in management may offer some insights into the importance of inequality when thinking about phenomena
like priming. Caver and Livers (2004) document stressors or challenges of black individuals in leadership roles that may trigger
their capacity to inuence others. Stressors like identity, interactions between race and gender, responsibility demands for
networking and political maneuvering suggest that identity-related constraints may activate something in the leaders that yields
positive outcomes for their leadership. Research by Meyerson (2001) had also documented acts of resistance in leaders viewed as
outsiders (often women and people of color) who challenged taken-for-granted assumptions of the dominant culture and
unexpectedly produced innovation. This is similar to priming but it appears self-motivated in leaders of color.
Leadership traditions that highlighted the role of culture in the relationship between raceethnicity and leadership have made
important contributions to the eld. That they acknowledged power but did not develop a power analysis may help understand
how far they were able to take their insights about the linkages between social identity and leadership.
4.2.3. From dualistic to holistic explorations of agency and structure
As a corollary of the previous shifts, a study's location in a given circle signals variations in attention to the role of agency and
structure as they connect raceethnicity to leadership. Well-established sociological theories (Giddens, 1979) challenge the
dualistic separation between person and situation, individual and organization, and at the most abstract level, agency and
structure. They suggest that actions and interactions of social agents are both generative of social structure and constrained by it
(Giddens & Turner, 1987). Our review suggests that much is gained by considering this reciprocal relationship in leadership
studies.
While leadership theory has always emphasized agency over structure, studies that focus on leaders of color as only
constrained by their raceethnicity, as those from the rst circle, inevitably portray them as relatively passive, lacking control over
their fate. In research that views social identity as an individual resource, as in the second circle, leaders of color become stronger
agents. Further, a view of identity as a group resource, per studies in the third circle, explores collective agency, while offering a
more balanced understanding of the limits set by structure and the possibilities for action stemming from the shared work of
leadership.
Insights from the educational leadership illustrate this. Intersectionality underscores the situated response to multiple, shifting
identities interacting in particular cultural contexts and power structures. The portrait of leaders of color as active agents contrasts
with earlier studies that compare black and white leadership styles as if these happened in a vacuum, and may help explain the
mixed ndings of earlier reviews that used a xed understanding of race (Bartol et al., 1978; Bass 1990, 2008).
The simultaneous consideration of individual and collective dimensions of both phenomena also leads the analyst to grapple
with the interconnections between agency and structure. The explicit introduction of a power lens acknowledges the salience of
social inequality. As leadership underscores the role of agency, and raceethnicity calls attention to culture and structure, the
analyst must also attend to both the micro and the macro dynamics of power inuencing the experience of leaders and followers.
This in turn helps to balance attention to the who and the how of leadership.
Viewing raceethnicity from several vantage points highlights both agency and structure in the work of leadership. Race
ethnicity is a constraint imposed on social actors per studies in the rst circle. But it is also a potential resource to navigate
organizational life, per studies in the second circle, and to do collective leadership work per studies in the third circle. The key
lesson is that considering both the constraining and the liberating potential of raceethnicity for individuals and for their capacity
to engage in leadership work represents a very powerful assumption to inform future empirical research.
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4.2.4. From linear to reciprocal causation

Finally, the categories in our framework vary in terms of how scholars see the direction of causation. Moving progressively
from inner to outer circles, raceethnicity shifts from an independent variable affecting perceptions or enactments of leadership to
a dependent variable inuenced by the work of leadership and nally to a view that incorporates understandings of raceethnicity
as both cause and outcome. This shift also reects the gradual progression toward a deeper interest in the collective dimensions of
leadership and social identity.
In studies from the rst and second circles, the direction of causality between raceethnicity and leadership is given from the
offset: the question is how does raceethnicity affect leadership? This assumes that identities cannot be changed, while leadership
can, so the causality is always from raceethnicity to leadership. Neo-charismatic discussions of priming as reviewed in the third
circle introduce a more uid view of social identity that loosens this assumption: leadership can help to shape followers' identities.
Yet the direction of inuence associated with this mechanism, from leaders to followers, remains unchallenged. In documenting
self-activation and reciprocal activation of salient identities, management and educational studies (e.g. Caver & Livers, 2004;
Loder, 2005; Meyerson, 2001; Tillman, 2004) suggest that the image of leaders priming the identities of followers to motivate
them may represent only part of the story about the relationship between social identity and leadership.
Considering the collective dimensions of both leadership and social identity challenges the assumptions of linear causation
from raceethnicity to leadership and from leaders to followers. A similar logic can be extended to analyze the relationship
between leadership and context. A uid view of both constructs suggests that context is where processes and structures required
to organize collective action emerge. And raceethnicity is one of the raw materials from which leadership is co-constructed in
interaction, given the constraints, opportunities and conditions required to address the demands that call forth leadership (Drath,
2001). This view is consistent with relational scholars' notion that leadership is embedded in context and that they must be treated
as the two interacting sides of the same reality (Ospina & Hittleman, forthcoming; Uhl-Bien, Marion, & McKelvey, 2007).
Summing up, we have rst discussed the costs associated with color blind approaches and with considering insights from
research on people of color only as special cases rather than as sources for theorizing. We then offered an integrated framework of
the insights from our review of the received literature on the relationship between raceethnicity and leadership. We have
reviewed the key shifts identied in our analysis and drew implications for theory and research in the leadership eld: from simple
to complex considerations of context, from an implicit acknowledgment of power to a power analysis, from dualistic to holistic
explorations of agency and structure, and from linear to reciprocal causation. In discussing these shifts we also highlighted the
theoretical convergence that considers the uid and collective dimensions of both raceethnicity and leadership.
5. Implications for future research
Our review has illustrated the enormous range of topics and approaches to the intersection of race and leadership. While not
explicitly highlighting it, we have also documented a wide array of methods with which to study leadership, from experiments and
surveys to ethnographies, narrative inquiry, and phenomenological studies.
Yet our discussion also suggests important challenges that require urgent attention. First, within the sub-eld of race and
leadership studies there is inconsistency in ndings and few efforts to replicate studies to clarify these inconsistencies, particularly
given the variety of conceptual frameworks and methodologies. Second, there is a lack of dialogue across disciplinary silos,
particularly between mainstream leadership and management studies on the one hand, and the educational, communications,
policy and other applied elds on the other. Third, mainstream theorizing on leadership overlooks the important insights from
research on race and leadership and underestimates the value of the experience of leaders of color. And nally, there is an implicit
bias in the mainstream literature to construct models that use western views and whiteness as the referent from which to study
and theorize leadership as a universal phenomenon.
Despite these gaps, we believe the eld is poised for important breakthroughs. Here, we offer some suggestions for next steps
and promising areas for future research.
First, researchers may consider the key questions posed in this review. How does raceethnicity affect perceptions of
leadership? How does it affect the ways leadership is enacted? And how do leaders grapple with the social reality of race
ethnicity? We believe that all three questions still require attention but that they might be more fruitfully pursued together since
each informs the other. Research studies designed to consider all three could move the eld forward considerably.
Second, there is value in continuing to support the use of multiple methodologies to study the relationship between race
ethnicity and leadership. Nevertheless, inconsistency in ndings must be addressed methodologically. For example, a formal
meta-analysis of the quantitative work may begin to lay the groundwork for dealing with these inconsistencies. For future work,
another possible avenue is to consistently use mixed and hybrid methodologies (like survey and ethnographic or
phenomenological work) that can incorporate context more explicitly. Of course, the choice of method is a function of the
question under study. The key point is that positivist and interpretivist studies alike, whether using quantitative, qualitative or
mixed methodologies, ought to inform conceptual, methodological and analytical choices with special attention to the uid nature
of raceethnicity and leadership.
Third, there is need to develop a healthy pluralism that fosters much more cross fertilization among disciplines and among
research perspectives. Scholars in mainstream leadership studies could draw important knowledge to inform their work in
corporate and nonprot settings with the insights gained in educational settings.
Fourth, we suggest four promising topical areas for future exploration. One refers to whiteness as a social identity with
equally charged social meanings to consider when exploring the relationship between raceethnicity and leadership. While there
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is increasing work on whiteness in sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, little of it has reached the management and
organizations' literature, much less the leadership literature (a signicant exception is Rosette et al. (2008)). It could be useful to
explore the role of whiteness in leadership. How have understandings of leadership become so connected with whiteness? Also,
our image of white leaders emphasizing their own race is that of white supremacists. Are there examples of white leaders who
draw on their culture and identity, but in egalitarian ways?
Another promising topic is intersectionality. Richardson and Loubier (2008) offer a compelling reason to bring it to the study of
leadership: analysis of complex social situations should not reduce understanding to a singular category; rather, it should
facilitate the understanding of substantively distinct experiences from the effects of inextricably connected roles and situations
(p. 143). What would we learn about the relationship of raceethnicity and leadership if we introduced other dimensions of
leaders' and follower's multiple layered social identities such as gender, class, sexual orientation and so on? How would this
illuminate attributions of leaders and followers? How do these intersected identities inuence leadership enactments, including
styles and choices associated with the purpose of leadership? How do they affect reactions to environments where raceethnicity
is salient, or constructions of both raceethnicity and leadership? Additional work can also deepen received insights about the
intersection of race and gender.
A third area of promise refers to the potential from the convergence of theoretical developments in critical race theory and
leadership theory. As both raceethnicity and leadership are increasingly understood as malleable and collective, the direction of
causality between them cannot be assumed, but becomes an empirical question. If prior leadership research assumed that race
ethnicity inuences actors' enactments, some scholars now ask whether leadership itself affects how social actors experience, use,
and live their raceethnicity.
Making raceethnicity the dependent variable in studies exploring its association to leadership opens a new agenda for
empirical research with questions such as: how do people dene and understand both leadership and raceethnicity? How do
these understandings help people draw on their raceethnicity as they create leadership practices? To what extent do social actors
use their raceethnicity, that of their leaders or followers, and social identity in general to create, negotiate and navigate leaderfollower relational dynamics and the ongoing demands for organizing and structuring that require leadership? These
questions are rst and foremost questions about the how of leadership.
The nal area of promise refers to broadening the scope of social actors, contexts and policy arenas used in empirical research
on raceethnicity and leadership. For example, how can the rich insights from black leadership scholarship be tested with social
actors from other races-ethnicities different from African Americans? Can insights from the educational eld be used to inform
research on other policy contexts like immigration or health? Can these insights be tested in other service areas such as social work
and counseling? Similarly, how does the relationship between raceethnicity and leadership change at different hierarchical levels
or in organizational sub-units differing in demographic composition? Does the way raceethnicity and leadership connect vary
across different models of leadership, from less to more distributed forms, or in contexts where leadership is shared or
decentralized?
Clearly, the proposed agenda is quite ambitious. It will require that the next generation of researchers be equipped with a more
varied conceptual and methodological toolkit. This means that their mentors at least understand the advantages of encouraging
and supporting new scholars in their journey. In other words, future research aim at a better understanding of the role of race
ethnicity in the work of leadership might require some important change in the mental models of those who shape curriculum,
pedagogy and structure rewards in doctoral programs that train leadership researchers today.
Acknowledgements
Our thanks and appreciation for the excellent support provided by Research Assistant Sindri V. McDonald and Research
Associate Waad El Hadidy, from the Research Center for Leadership in Action of Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, New
York University.
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Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

The Leadership Quarterly

A critical review of race and ethnicity in the leadership literature: Surfacing

Corresponding author. Tel.: + 1 212 998 7436.

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Total number of sources analyzed: 148.

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3.2.1. Comparing white and black leadership styles

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4.2. Toward an integrated framework of knowledge about race and leadership

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Fig. 1. An integrated framework of insights about raceethnicity and leadership.

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4.2.4. From linear to reciprocal causation

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