Abstract: Underdog narratives describe actors who face unfavorable conditions, limited resources, or low expectations but strive to overcome these disadvantages. Previous research has documented the positive effects of such narratives primarily in marketing and strategic contexts, where they are often used to shape external audiences' attitudes and gain support. However, considerably less is known about how underdog narratives function within organizations. In particular, little is known about how organizational leaders can use underdog narratives to influence disadvantaged groups and promote innovation. This research addresses this issue by focusing on low-status teams, an often-overlooked group that may face disadvantages in access to resources, organizational influence, and recognition while also possessing considerable innovative potential. Drawing on sensemaking theory, the research examines how leaders construct and communicate underdog narratives to shape team members' understanding of their disadvantaged circumstances and transform unfavorable positions into a shared basis for collective action and innovation.
The research proceeds in several stages. First, it seeks to clarify the definition and characteristics of leaders' underdog narratives. It proposes that leaders' underdog narratives comprise three core dimensions: disadvantage resonance, opportunity guidance, and capability enhancement. Disadvantage resonance refers to constructing a shared understanding of the team's disadvantaged position, encouraging members to confront their disadvantages and stimulating their motivation to overcome them. Opportunity guidance refers to articulating clear goals that help the team identify opportunities to move beyond its disadvantaged position and provide direction for collective action. Capability enhancement refers to strengthening the team's confidence through narratives, enhancing members' perceptions of their collective ability to overcome difficulties, and empowering subsequent action. The research then examines how leaders' underdog narratives promote innovation in low-status teams. Rather than treating team innovation as a single outcome, it distinguishes between idea generation and idea implementation, two interconnected stages with different central tasks. Idea generation primarily involves exploratory activities, such as acquiring diverse information and exploring new possibilities, whereas idea implementation emphasizes the coordination and use of knowledge, capabilities, and resources to transform ideas into practical outcomes. On this basis, the research investigates how leaders' underdog narratives shape low-status teams' needs to seek external resources and integrate internal resources and how these needs subsequently motivate team responses. Two pathways with different emphases across the innovation process are proposed: one centered on external resource-seeking needs and primarily associated with idea generation, and the other centered on internal resource-integration needs and primarily associated with idea implementation. The research also examines how team status disparity and the stability of teams' status shape the effectiveness of leaders' underdog narratives, thereby identifying the status-related conditions under which such narratives are more likely to facilitate innovation in low-status teams.
The research will employ a mixed-methods approach integrating qualitative and quantitative research. The initial stage will clarify and refine the conceptualization and dimensions of leaders' underdog narratives. Subsequent studies will develop and validate a measurement scale and empirically examine the proposed relationships, mechanisms, and boundary conditions. The findings will then be integrated to establish an overall model explaining how leaders' underdog narratives influence innovation in low-status teams. The research is expected to strengthen the theoretical foundation of leaders' underdog narratives by moving beyond preliminary conceptual discussions toward a more systematic conceptualization and measurement of the construct in organizational settings. It further broadens the understanding of the effectiveness of leaders' underdog narratives by introducing a resource-needs perspective and examining how such narratives activate low-status teams' needs for external resource seeking and internal resource integration, thereby shaping different responses across the innovation process. In addition, by examining the role of team and organizational status characteristics as boundary conditions, the research seeks to clarify when and under what status-related conditions leaders' underdog narratives are more likely to be effective. These efforts extend underdog narrative research from external audiences to internal organizational contexts, enrich the understanding of leadership communication under disadvantage, and provide a more differentiated explanation of how leadership can mobilize low-status teams to innovate. The findings may also offer practical guidance for leaders and organizations seeking to transform disadvantage into a source of collective motivation, resource mobilization, and innovation.

Key words: leader's underdog narrative, low-status teams, team innovation, resource needs, sensemaking theory