From Imposter to Original: How Organizational Leaders Shape and Develop a Leader Identity Through Meaning‐Making of Experiences

ABSTRACT This article describes how people in formal leadership roles shape and develop a leader identity through meaning‐making of experiences across time and situations. Drawing on qualitative data from in‐depth life narrative interviews with 22 organizational leaders, enriched through photo and object elicitation techniques as well as timeline mapping, we offer an understanding of how meanings made and meaning‐making modes impact leader identity development. We found that most organizational leaders in our sample described an evolving sense of self as a leader over the course of their careers, moving from identity uncertainty and imposter feelings to identity coherence and feeling like an original. This transition was connected to three key shifts in meanings made: (1) a development of cognitive complexity, (2) a development of schema alignment, and (3) a development of self‐schema clarity. These shifts were facilitated by leaders' ongoing, deliberate engagement in specific modes of meaning‐making (i.e., cognitive identity work). These findings contribute a new dimension to leader identity scholarship by highlighting the importance of schema growth, alignment, and integration in the development and maintenance of leader identity, as well as to the value of deep thinking and purposeful acting as complementary modes of identity work.