What we know about Leadership

TLDR

Leadership is a crucial human science phenomenon that shapes team, group, and organizational performance, and personality traits predict who becomes an effective leader. The article reviews empirical studies on personality, leadership, and organizational effectiveness to highlight three key insights. The authors conduct a literature review synthesizing findings on personality, leadership, and organizational outcomes.

Abstract

This article reviews the empirical literature on personality, leadership, and organizational effectiveness to make 3 major points. First, leadership is a real and vastly consequential phenomenon, perhaps the single most important issue in the human sciences. Second, leadership is about the performance of teams, groups, and organizations. Good leadership promotes effective team and group performance, which in turn enhances the well-being of the incumbents; bad leadership degrades the quality of life for everyone associated with it. Third, personality predicts leadership—who we are is how we lead—and this information can be used to select future leaders or improve the performance of current incumbents.