Leadership Research Summary:
- The study addresses leadership emergence and the possibility that there is a partially innate predisposition to occupy a leadership role. Employing twin design methods on data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we estimate the heritabilityof leadership role occupancy at 24%.
- Twin studies do not point to specific genes or neurological processes that might be involved. The study therefore also conducted association analysis on the available genetic markers.
- The results show that leadership role occupancy is associated with rs4950, a single nucleotidepolymorphism (SNP) residing on a neuronal acetylcholine receptor gene (CHRNB3).
- Researchers replicate this family-based genetic association result on an independent sample in the Framingham Heart Study. This is the first study to identify a specific genotype associated with the tendency to occupy a leadership position. The results suggest that what determines whether an individual occupies a leadership position is the complex product of genetic and environmental influences, with a particular role for rs4950.
Leadership Research Implications and Findings:
- As suggested by Antonakis (2011, 272)research into genetic determinants of leadership is “very fundamental in nature and does not have immediate practical utility….” The results in the study are unlikely to have any direct implications for assessment and selection (and even if they did, privacy concerns would likely render the information unusable). Instead, researchers think this research is useful for understanding how leadership emerges and how we might be able to adapt environmental factors to improve leadership ability. Additional research is needed to ascertain the role of rs4950 (and many other genotypes) in shaping leadership emergence, and other possible genetic factors influencing leadership effectiveness.
- Additionally, the study should draw attention to the ethical issues surrounding the use of genetic tests for leadership selection and assessment. Human resource managers should be aware of the ethical problems that genetic profiling introduces into standard human resource management procedures. It is unlikely that individuals will want to be screened in this way, and the potential for violation of privacy means that we should seriously consider extending current protections against genetic discrimination from health care to employment. Given that genetic factors do not explain most of the variance in leadership emergence, our main suggestion for practice is that this research may help in the identification of specific environmental factors that can help in the development of leadership skills.
- The results we report here suggest that what determines whether people occupy leadership positions may be a complex product of genetic and environmental influences. But this is just the beginning. To better understand the causal mechanisms underlying leadership role occupancy, future research should investigate whether the genetic variant rs4950and the neuronal acetylcholine receptor genes affect alternative measures of leadership emergence, leadership types, and personality traits that are essential components of leadership emergence and effectiveness.
- It should also focus on the way these and other genetic variants interact with contextual influences to jointly shape leadership. But most importantly, future work should not assume that the environment is all that matters. If researchers really want to understand leadership and its effect on organizational, institutional, economic, and political outcomes, we must study both nature and nurture.