Leaders play a pivotal role in shaping employee interactions, making it crucial to understand employee identity within this relationship. While leader identification has been extensively researched, leader disidentification remains relatively underexplored. This research seeks to address this gap from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. First, it defines and elaborates on the concepts of leader identification and disidentification through a comprehensive literature review. Second, across four empirical studies, the research develops and validates scales for measuring these constructs and explores their conceptual distinctiveness. Study 1 is a qualitative investigation that examines leader disidentification in organizations through interviews with 10 full-time employees, leading to the development of a new scale. Study 2 validates the content of the leader identification and disidentification scales using data from 50 participants. Study 3, involving 172 participants, confirms the reliability and construct validity of both scales. Finally, Study 4, with data from 293 participants, explores the nomological network surrounding leader identification and disidentification.
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