My research examines how leaders can unite individuals around shared visions while navigating the structural, relational, and emotional complexities that enable collective success. My scholarly journey began with fundamental questions about visionary leadership — how leaders’ communication of an image of the future can motivate and mobilize collective action. This foundational work revealed critical insights about the barriers that prevent leaders from effectively uniting people toward pursuing common goals, naturally leading me to investigate the complex dynamics underlying these barriers: how organizational structures shape vision legitimacy, how identity influences the interpretation of visionary leadership, how various forms of distance affect collective action, and crucially, how leaders build the emotional cultures necessary for sustained pursuit of shared visions.
How Leaders Unite People around a Vision
My first stream of research explores how leaders can communicate an ultimate common goal/vision and how they can unite people around it despite all the factors dividing them. The extent to which leaders articulate a common goal is central to our understanding of not only how leaders inspire action to realize the goals, but also speaks to the core of leadership itself, because leading is defined as the process of influencing others to achieve a common goal. In my own research, I seek to understand how leaders can effectively communicate a vision to unite people toward achieving it. In doing so, I also investigate various facilitating and inhibiting conditions for leaders to be able to unite people around a common vision. This is because rallying people around a shared vision rarely is a matter of communicating a vision, but there is also always more involved in terms of individual and organizational contingencies.
How Leaders Shape an Emotional Culture
"Emotions are not noise. They're data" - Sigal Barsade
Emotions serve as more than just a glimpse into an individual's psyche; they act as a multifaceted lens through which we can comprehend the culture of teams and organizations. My second stream of research seeks to understand how leaders create an emotional culture in their teams, departments, and organizations. While my first stream of work investigates how leaders can create a collective sharedness around what the organization aims to achieve in the future, the second line of my research explores how leaders can build collective deep assumptions, values, and norms a social unit has about which emotions they should express or suppress as they work together.
Publications
[1] van Knippenberg, D., Bilgin, B., van Ginkel, W. P., & Pearce, C. L. (forthcoming 2026). On the interface of shared leadership and vertical leadership. In C. L. Pearce (Ed.), Shared leadership: The next wave. Palgrave Macmillan.
[2] Zhang, J. W., Howell, R. T., Chen, C., Goold, A. R., Bilgin, B., Chai, W. J., Ramis, T. 2022. ‘I have high self‐compassion’: A Face‐Valid Single‐Item Self‐Compassion Scale for Resource‐Limited Research Contexts. Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy, 29 (4), 1463-1474.
[3] Zhang, J.W., Chen, S., Tomova, T., Bilgin, B., Chai, W. J., Ramis, T., Shaban-Azad, H., Razavi, P., Nutankumar, T., & Manukyan, A. 2019. A compassionate self is a true self? Self-compassion promotes authenticity. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 45(9), 1323–37.
Research Under Review & Revision
[4] Bilgin, B., van Knippenberg, D., Hoever, I., & de Haas, M [topic: Visionary leadership and hierarchy]. Revise and Resubmit: Journal of Organizational Behavior.
[5] Creary, S., Seegars, L., Bilgin, B., & Martin, A. Development of organizational allyship signaling. Under review: Academy of Management Journal.
[6] Bilgin, B., Carton. A., & van Knippenberg, D. [topic: Leader communication and corporate volunteering]. Under review: Management Science.
[7] Bilgin, B., Dietz, B., & van Knippenberg, D. [topic: External and internal vision communication]. Under review: Journal of Management.
[8] Nederveen Pieterse, A., Hoever, I., & Bilgin, B. Goal-orientation and instrumentality in team performance. Under review: Journal of Applied Psychology.
[9] Zhang, J.W., Chen, S., Tomova, T., Bilgin, B. Self-Compassion Growth Mindset Fosters Self-Compassion Intention. Under review: Mindfulness.
Research In Progress
[10] Bilgin, B., & van Knippenberg, D. The vision impossible. Target: Academy of Management Journal. Writing stage.
[11] Bilgin, B., O’Neill, O. A., & van Knippenberg, D. Leadership and the emotional culture. Target: Academy of Management
Review. Writing stage.
[12] Creary, S., Younge, A., & Bilgin, B. [topic: Inclusive leadership]. Target: Academy of Management Journal. Data collection
for Study 4.
[13] Bilgin, B., Carton. A., & van Knippenberg, D. [topic: Leader communication]. Target: Academy of Management Journal.
Data collection for Study 2.
(July, 2025). Annual Meeting of Academy of Management. Copenhagen, Denmark.
(June, 2024) My dissertation defense. Rotterdam, Netherlands.
(October, 2022) The 11th Annual Doctoral Consortium of Wharton-INSEAD Alliance, Philadelphia, PA.