9. The Impact of Personality on Leadership

Chapter 8 has demonstrated that the relationship between intelligence and leadership is not as strong as we might expect. Because leaders have to gather, interpret and integrate vast amounts of information in their work, and develop strategies and solve problems, it would seem reasonable to expect intelligence to play a major role in leadership effectiveness. Yet, the effect, as we have seen, is moderately small and accounts for no more than 7.5% of the variance in leadership effectiveness, and only when leaders are ‘directive’ (Judge et al. 2004). This is partly due to the fact that to get to a position of leadership you have to be (or at least, seem) pretty bright and therefore there is not as much variance in the abilities of people near the top as there is in the population at large.