Rather than focusing on titles and hierarchies, some recent work in the leadership literature has begun to explore how leaders view themselves, both within and outside of their formal roles. This symposium seeks to advance the field’s understanding of the effects of leader self-perceptions on leadership outcomes and invites the audience into an inquiry of the role of leader self-awareness and leader identity in the leadership process. The research presented seeks to better understand (1) how leaders view themselves, (2) how leaders may increase identification with the leader role, and (3) the benefits of this identity for leadership behaviors, including leader effectiveness as well as outcomes for followers.

Digitalization has a broad impact and the risk of external disruption is omnipresent throughout all industries which also applies to IT consulting firms. One response to this threat is to understand better the determinants of how value is created during the joint work on an IT project. Although previous literature offers valuable starting points for explaining value co-creation, no previous research synthesizes service provider and client perspective in a comprehensive model and empirically explains the co-creation of IT consulting service value. We build on the service-dominant (SD) logic as the fundamental meta-theory and evaluate our deductively derived structural model based on 113 collected responses from IT consulting projects using structural equation modeling. Our major finding is that IT consulting service value only seems to be determined by consultant capabilities. Our findings provide new insights for SD logic and service science literature and potential for future research.