Although leaders are frequently tasked with initiating and implementing social and organizational change, facilitating widespread support for change initiatives is often challenging. One source of change resistance stems from perceptions that the change will fundamentally alter the authentic group identity. Leaders who are deemed legitimate representations of the group identity (i.e., group prototypical) are trusted to protect the “true” group identity and tend to be more successful change leaders than leaders who are perceived to be poor representations of the group identity (i.e., non-prototypical). Three experiments (total N = 989) tested the proposition that non-prototypical leaders can use rhetoric that promotes collective identity continuity to increase self-uncertain group members' support for change initiatives. Across two experiments, self-uncertain participants were more supportive of change initiatives proposed by a non-prototypical leader who used rhetoric emphasizing continuity of, rather than change to, the authentic group identity. In the third experiment, support for the hypotheses was only found after exploratory analyses excluded 27% of the sample. Thus, this work indicates that non-prototypical leaders who use continuity rhetoric may be able to leverage their group members’ uncertainty during change initiatives to improve their group’s support for the change. However, future work is needed to examine the strength and generalizability of these findings across different organizational contexts.

尽管领导者经常承担发起和实施社会和组织变革的任务，但促进对变革举措的广泛支持往往具有挑战性。变革阻力的一个根源在于人们认为变革将从根本上改变真实的群体身份。被认为是群体身份的合法代表（即群体原型）的领导者被信任能够保护“真实”的群体身份，并且往往比那些被认为不能代表群体身份的领导者（即群体原型）更成功地成为变革领导者。非原型）。三个实验（总计N  = 989）测试了以下命题：非典型领导者可以使用促进集体身份连续性的修辞来增加自我不确定的群体成员对变革举措的支持。在两项实验中，自我不确定的参与者更支持非典型领导者提出的变革举措，该领导者使用强调真实群体身份的连续性而不是改变的修辞。在第三个实验中，只有在探索性分析排除了 27% 的样本后才发现对假设的支持。因此，这项工作表明，使用连续性修辞的非典型领导者可能能够在变革举措期间利用其团队成员的不确定性来提高团队对变革的支持。然而，未来的工作需要检验这些发现在不同组织环境中的强度和普遍性。