The influence of general mental ability, self-esteem and family socioeconomic status on leadership role occupancy and leader advancement: The moderating role of gender
Section snippets
General mental ability and leadership
General mental ability (GMA), general cognitive ability or general intelligence, refers to a general factor of cognitive abilities, including quantitative, verbal, spatial and reasoning aptitude and the like (Gottfredson, 1997, Hunter and Schmidt, 1998, Ree and Earles, 1992). Consistent with research on job performance, in which GMA is viewed as playing a “central role” in predicting job performance (Schmidt & Hunter, 2004, p. 162), the area of leadership research has long acknowledged the
Self-esteem and leadership
Self-esteem denotes people's general evaluation of themselves and their perceptions of self-worth across situations, which is different from self efficacy referring to individual's belief in his/her ability to deal with specific situations (Gist and Mitchell, 1992, Rosenberg, 1989). Empirical research reports that self-esteem is associated positively with various leadership variables (e.g., leadership emergence, leadership effectiveness and leader advancement by extension). For instance,
Family socioeconomic status and leadership
Socioeconomic status (SES) is a multifaceted construct, which usually represents information with respect to income, education and occupation (Bradley and Corwyn, 2002, Conger and Donnellan, 2007, Ensminger and Fothergill, 2003). An accumulating body of literature on child development has well documented the influence of family socioeconomic status on child development, such as academic achievement and career development (Bradley and Corwyn, 2002, Elo, 2009, Fouad, 2007, Halaby, 2003, Hartung
Effects of gender
A large body of literature has been devoted to examining gender issues in leadership (e.g., Carli and Eagly, 2011, Morrison and Von Glinow, 1990, Powell and Graves, 2003). In the current study, while we examine the main effect of gender, we also focus on the moderating role of gender in the effects of GMA, self-esteem, and family SES on leadership role occupancy and leader advancement. We expect that gender will have a main effect on leadership role occupancy and leader advancement, and that
Sample
Data for this study was obtained from National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) database, which was administered by the U.S. Department of Labor. This is a longitudinal study which interviewed a national representative sample of 12,686 individuals from 1979 to 2006 regarding their work and life situations. We only included participants who provided complete data on the variables of interest (e.g., leadership, self-esteem, GMA, family SES, gender and control variables). The sample was
Results
The means, SEs and zero-order correlations among variables in this study are shown in Table 1. Of the 1747 individuals, 749 reported they held or had held a supervisory position in 1988. The numbers are 736, 736, 848 and 852 for the years of 1989, 1990, 1996 and 1998 respectively. Four hundred and seven individuals never held any supervisory position in the five years.5
Discussion
Results of the current study suggest that general mental abilities, self-esteem, family socioeconomic status and demographic variables have influences on leadership role occupancy and leader advancement in terms of scope of responsibility. First, self-esteem, people's general evaluation of themselves, is one driving force for people to rise as a leader and advance on the leadership track. Self-esteem significantly impacted the starting point of leadership role occupancy (the intercept of the
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2020, Leadership QuarterlyCitation Excerpt :Previous work on self-esteem has provided evidence that it is consistent over time (Blascovich & Tomaka, 1991; Orth & Robins, 2014), relates to behaviors such as task effort and persistence (Felson, 1984; McFarlin, Baumeister, & Blascovich, 1984) that likely influence career efforts, and predicts success and well-being in areas such as relationships, work, and health (Orth & Robins, 2014). In terms of leadership, recent longitudinal work by Li, Arvey, and Song (2011) showed that self-esteem significantly impacted leadership role occupancy for both women and men, with higher levels of self-esteem associated with higher odds of becoming a leader. Thus, we also examine the relationship between college levels of self-esteem and later life occupational success and satisfaction.
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