5 Are Leaders Born or Made?

We live, learn, and work in environments where leaders and leadership are ubiquitous, and we have all likely encountered the extremes of leadership: Those wonderful leaders who elevate, respect, and develop us, and those leaders who sadly demean, humiliate, and belittle us. In trying to make sense of the extremes of leadership, most people have probably asked themselves—and others—whether leaders are born or made? Indeed, the extent to which we are absorbed by this issue can be gauged by submitting the question “Are leaders born or made?” to a search on google.com; doing so produced 37, 100, 000 results in 0.14 seconds!ⁱ

Whether leadership is born or made is an issue about which most people have an opinion, often a very strong opinion. Even Shakespeare weighed in on the issue with his unforgettable observation in Twelfth Night that “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” Perhaps we should not be surprised at how widespread opinions are on this issue. B.F. Skinner, one of the most influential and controversial psychologists of the 20th century, suggested some 40 years ago that we all stand “in awe of the inexplicable.”¹ And what could be more seemingly inexplicable than some of the greatest leaders of the 20th century, be it Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Ghandi, or Mother Theresa, or some of their most destructive counterparts, such as Hitler, Pol Pot, or Stalin? When faced with big questions (such as explaining seemingly inexplicable leadership abilities), we seek “big” answers, and many people, psychologists included, believe that extraordinary leadership must surely be the gift of good genes, rather than something that can be learned.

All of this is exemplified in attempts to make sense of Nelson Mandela’s leadership. Commenting on the enormity of his leadership, noted organizational scholar Rosabeth Moss Kanter observed that “There are very few people in the world who could have done what he did. I mean 27 years in prison, and coming out and repairing a troubled nation and forgiving his enemies. He’s off the charts when it comes to leadership.” In response to the question “Are leaders born or made?” Kanter went further, saying, “I think Nelson Mandela in South Africa had to be a natural leader....I think you probably have to be born Mandela.”² And Rosabeth Moss Kanter is not alone in these beliefs. After meeting Mandela, Roy Anderson, an industrialist and CEO of several large companies in South Africa during the 1990s, observed that “His charisma goes way beyond people respecting what he stands for and the sacrifices he has made, ” adding his voice to the familiar refrain that this “must be something he was born with.”³

But to believe that genetic factors alone can fully explain the emergence and development of Mandela’s leadership is to ignore the critical role that his early childhood socialization played in his later development—a common tendency among many biographers whose focus was primarily on Mandela’s life after he ascended to leadership positions in the African National Congress (ANC) as a young man in the 1950s.⁴ In doing so, they cast no light on his early family life, his teenage years, or his experiences as a university student. Rather than accepting that his early socialization was irrelevant to his subsequent leadership, a closer examination suggests the opposite is closer to the truth.

Nonetheless, understanding the influence of family and environmental factors in Mandela’s early life on his later leadership is complicated by several factors. First, there is a reasonable fear that being able to understand any early influences might in some way minimize the magic of Mandela’s leadership, but there need be no such concerns. Instead, understanding the roots of Mandela’s leadership will remind us of the pervasive importance of early family socialization and adverse experiences in the development of leadership (e.g., parental alcoholism in the case of Bill Clinton’s leadership, the early death of the father, as in the cases of Mandela, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Nixon, to name just a few, or the early death of Eleanor Roosevelt’s father and four-year-old brother). Second, retrospectively understanding the leadership roots of anyone who has achieved iconic or mythical status is challenging, because we ascribe our own needs, dreams, and fears onto the iconic leader, all of which complicates the search for an objective understanding.

From scholars who have given serious attention to Mandela’s early life, one thing is clear: While most rural Black children in South Africa lived lives of privation, this was not to be Mandela’s plight. From a very early age, Mandela led a life of relative privilege. Mandela’s father, Henry Gadla, was comfortable financially, at least relative to others in his community. Mandela was a member of the royal family of the ruling Thembu clan in the Transkei,⁵ and after his father’s death from tuberculosis when he was 10 years old,⁶ Mandela was accepted as a ward of the Regent of the Thembu, and a companion to the Regent’s son. As a child, Mandela was afforded the unusual opportunity of attending elite Methodist elementary schools, where he was eventually made a prefect in his boarding school—a position of considerable status, responsibility, and authority. Mandela also attended Healdtown, a prestigious Wesleyan secondary school. Some six decades later, former school friends remembered him for his magnanimity. These extraordinary opportunities for a rural, Black person in South Africa became more pronounced upon graduation from high school, when Mandela enrolled at Fort Hare University, “one of an intake of around 50 black Southern Africans”⁷ in the year in which he enrolled. To understand what all this meant in South Africa in the early 1940s, recall that most young Black men grew up on farms or near cities, and precious few would have even attempted, let alone completed, secondary education.

It was at Fort Hare University that Mandela became politicized,⁸ meeting many of the people with whom he would subsequently be politically involved. The influence of Fort Hare University in Mandela’s leadership development becomes increasingly evident when we learn that this university was home to other African students who subsequently achieved the ultimate leadership positions in their own countries after independence from their colonial power: Presidents Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Yusuf Lule of Uganda, and Julius Nyere of Tanzania; and Prime Minister of Botswana, Sir Seretse Khama.⁹ Add to this the list of students who would subsequently become the leaders of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa (e.g., Chris Hani, Rev. Allen Hendrickse, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Robert Sobukwe, and Oliver Tambo), and it is clear that Mandela would have found himself in the midst of an extraordinarily dynamic environment at an especially impressionable time of his life.

The early political power of the regent was such that when Mandela later arrived in Johannesburg as a young man in the 1940s after leaving Fort Hare University, he immediately obtained a valued job working for the gold mines. He also met Walter Sisulu, who later became Secretary General and Deputy President of the ANC. By Mandela’s own admission, Sisulu had a profound influence on his development.¹⁰ During the mid-1940s, Mandela served as an articled law clerk in Johannesburg before eventually qualifying as a lawyer at a time—1946—when the South African census could identify only 18 African lawyers and 13 articled clerks. From a social perspective, Mandela’s early encounters with the White community were unusually positive—including with his employers and mentors, Lazar Sidelsky and Nat Bregman. In fact, from his schooldays on, Mandela had the unusual opportunity of observing both Black and White role models, including situations in which Black teachers defied White authority. Clearly, then, Mandela’s early life was replete with situations in which he saw others challenge authority and did so himself, and he both witnessed and practiced leadership. Thus, we begin to see that Mandela’s subsequent leadership was likely a function of many different influences: genetic influences which should certainly not be discounted, early family adversity with the death of his father, a supportive family environment, early emergence as a leader in elementary school, and a rich political environment at a time when he was most amenable to political influence. Just how important experiences like this might be for the development of leadership will become clear throughout this chapter.

While intriguing, a single case study, even one as fascinating as Nelson Mandela, cannot unravel the complex roles of environmental and genetic factors in the emergence of leadership. So what do the results of scientific studies tell us? Fortunately, this issue has captured the attention of the research community and resulted in some imaginative and rigorous research studies. Before going any further, however, an important clarification is in order: Whether studies show that leaders are “born” or “made” is not just of theoretical interest, but may also have important practical implications for leaders’ motivation. If the dominant belief is that individuals are born with the ability to lead, any subsequent success might simply be ascribed to luck. If that is the case, those not lucky enough to have been born with the gift of leadership could justifiably absolve themselves of blame for any failures, which would be viewed as beyond their control. That being the case, it would make little sense for these leaders to work hard at improving their leadership skills if they believed that leadership ability is a fixed or immutable trait. In contrast, believing that leadership can be learned and improved through one’s own efforts would likely leave leaders inspired to work enthusiastically on their leadership behaviors. Clearly, whether leaders believe that leadership is learned or inherited can have significant effects on their motivation to lead.

Before turning to the scientific literature, perhaps it is appropriate to conclude this section by noting that even Mandela has an opinion on the nature-vs.-nurture debate. In his autobiography, Mandela tells us, “Nurture, rather than nature, is the primary moulder of personality.”¹¹ But could it be that both nature and nurture interact to influence leadership? What does research teach us?

An initial understanding that one’s early family environment might influence subsequent leadership derived indirectly from adolescents’ first occupational choices. In the early 1930s, Erland Nelson reported on a survey of 321 college students, the results of which showed that fathers’ occupations significantly influenced their children’s career choices.¹² What would probably not be surprising today is that any similarity between fathers’ occupations and their children’s career choice was substantially stronger if only the choices of sons were considered, because a girl’s choice of career was socially restricted at that time. The presence of gender differences in parental influences on children’s occupational choices has been replicated consistently in studies since then, including in very large samples outside of the United States (e.g., in India), thereby excluding the possibility that the phenomenon is specific to a North American context. The lesson learned from this research is that the family environments to which we are exposed early on affect subsequent occupational development, choices, and behaviors. Might these findings have any bearing on our understanding of the emergence of leadership?

At about the same time that Nelson reported the findings from his study, noted social scientist Emory Borgadus offered two observations on the importance of family influences for leadership development. First, Borgadus noticed that the leadership development of several famous politicians, for example, William E. Gladstone, Robert E. Lee, Woodrow Wilson, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington, had all been influenced through stimulating associations and interactions with their parents.¹³ At the same time, and seemingly arguing the opposite case, Borgadus reported that the early death of a parent forced children to assume responsibilities that could enhance leadership development, all of which raise the possibility that early family socialization affects the subsequent development of leadership.

Accepting the general importance of early socialization in children’s development, one early stream of research accorded special importance to the role of early adversity. Anecdotally, it is clear that not all children are necessarily affected negatively by early adversity in the long term, nor are all children who suffer early adversity affected in the same way (just as not all children who grow up in privileged circumstances benefit equally). Instead, some children seem to be unaffected by early adversity, and some suffer long-term consequences. But remarkably, some children rebound, or literally use the early adversity to propel themselves onto a successful life course.ⁱⁱ

Why might early adversity facilitate later leadership? Borgadus had already noted in 1934 that upon the death of a parent, children often assumed new responsibilities that encouraged leadership development. To support this, he quoted renowned sociologist and social activist Beatrice Webb: “The death of my mother revolutionized my life. From being a subordinate, carrying out directions, ...I became a principal, a person in authority, determining not only my own but other people’s conduct” (p. 88). Presidential scholar Doris Kearns Goodwin suggests that Eleanor Roosevelt’s experience of ongoing disappointments by her father, and then his early death and that of her four-year-old brother, was the source of a “legacy” of “resilient strength” (p. 95).¹⁴ In a similar vein, noted leadership scholar Warren Bennis¹⁵ speculated that what characterizes individuals who successfully overcome early setbacks is their ability to find meaning in their adversity. Research findings support these comments.

One of the first large-scale studies of the effects of early exposure to adversity was conducted by Glen Elder, and was based on his access to the Oakland Growth Study, which provided a unique database that was briefly mentioned in Chapter 4.¹⁶ For this particular study, data were collected on the psychological, social, and physical development of 167 children, starting initially in 1931 when they were all in fifth grade, continuing annually until 1939, with follow-up interviews conducted in the 1950s, in 1972, and again in 1982. This unusually rich dataset allowed for fascinating insights into the long-term effects of early experiences of hardship.¹⁷ Among a host of interesting findings generated by this study, one was especially relevant for understanding the effects of early adversity on subsequent development. Adolescents whose fathers became unemployed during the Great Depression showed significantly better adjustment later on in life—their school performance was enhanced, they were more likely to enter the university, and were more satisfied with their work, their marriages, and their lives—than their counterparts whose fathers did not become unemployed during this same period. Elder suggested that this occurred because successfully navigating through a stressful, complex, and precarious adolescence taught invaluable lessons that accelerated later development. The importance of transforming early adversity into success experiences for subsequent learning is evident.

Charles Cox and Cary Cooper conducted what might be the only specific study on the effects of early adversity on leadership role occupancy.¹⁸ They interviewed 45 CEOs, each of whom headed an organization with more than 1, 000 employees. Eight of the 45 CEOs had experienced the death of their father before they themselves were 16 years old; the parents of one CEO had separated before he was 5 years old; and 10 of the participants were separated from their parents at an early age (either as a result of evacuation in World War II or because they attended boarding school). Thus, fully 19 of the 45 CEOs had experienced adversity in the form of some separation from at least one of their parents. From the interviews, the researchers realized that the development of a sense of self-sufficiency was a major factor in their interviewees’ socialization, and that the most plausible factor motivating this self-sufficiency was their sense of early loss. Intriguingly, Cox and Cooper also noticed that despite the objective loss, and the sense of isolation and loneliness which forced these children to learn to rely on their own resources at an early age, as CEOs they retrospectively viewed their childhood as normal and happy. Thus, consistent with Elder’s “downward extension hypothesis, ” Cox and Cooper speculated that it is not the objective loss that affects subsequent leadership development, but how the loss affected early coping and successful experiences in assuming responsibility. Nonetheless, while respecting the difficulty of gaining the cooperation of busy CEOs of large organizations to participate in interviews, the findings from this study need to be interpreted cautiously because of the relatively small sample size and rudimentary statistical analyses.

At first glance, the study by Weng-Dong Li, Richard Arvey, and Zhaoli Song on leader role occupancy and advancement might seem to have little to do with the effects of adversity, but one finding from their research is particularly instructive.¹⁹ Using an unusually large sample of 1, 747 employed individuals from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth²⁰ over a 10-year period, they examined the effects of early family socioeconomic status on later leader emergence and advancement for men and women separately. While their findings showed that higher family socioeconomic status was weakly but positively associated with increases in leader advancement for men, the opposite was true for women. Specifically, early exposure to high family socioeconomic status had a negative effect on women’s leadership advancement—the higher the family socioeconomic status, the lower the likelihood of later leadership advancement. In explaining these results, Li and colleagues suggest that the pressures on adolescents in relatively privileged homes to consistently perform at very high levels might make it more likely that females shy away from risky situations, and this would include leadership advancement. The lessons from this research coincide with those from Cox and Cooper’s study on early adversity: Adolescent males who successfully confront the particular pressures inherent in privileged families might acquire invaluable skills and experience that stand them in good stead for subsequent development in general, and leadership in particular. The fact that adolescent women might be less willing to place themselves in similar situations will be explored further in Chapter 8.

The obvious fascination with children who navigate successfully through early adversity and their counterparts who do not heightens interest in the broad question of parental influences on children’s leadership development. It is to studies of this nature that we now turn our attention.

Just why would parent–child interactions influence children’s later leadership development? Bass, whose foundational influence on our understanding of organizational leadership is evident throughout this book, noted in his 1960 book Leadership, Psychology and Organizational Behavior  ²¹ that the scientific study of child development had already demonstrated the significance of the home environment in the development of children’s “initiative; resourcefulness; self-reliance” (p. 195). Bass noted further that children who were lucky enough to receive opportunities for decision-making and independence from their parents were “more likely to transfer these successful responses to...activities with other children, to school, and to adolescent and adult situations in later life” (p. 196).

Perhaps the earliest formal research study directly investigating parental influences on children’s leadership development was conducted in 1961 by renowned developmental psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner.²² Extending Bass’ observations, Bronfenbrenner argued that consistent with the emphasis within psychology at the time on problem behaviors, the idea that parents negatively influence the socialization of their children was well accepted. What was less well understood, and what intrigued Bronfenbrenner, was the possibility that parents might also exert positive effects on their children’s development. For his study, Bronfenbrenner randomly selected 10th-grade boys and girls from a school in upstate New York, and used a detailed questionnaire to ask the children about 20 facets of child–parent relationships—10 positive (e.g., parental affection, protectiveness, affiliative companionship) and 10 negative (e.g., parental neglect, physical punishment and threat, deprivation of privilege or property). Adding to the breadth of the study, two independent teachers separately rated the leadership behaviors of each of the children in the study.

What was learned from this early study? First, as we would now expect with the benefit of hindsight, both negative parenting (e.g., expressive rejection and neglect) and uninvolved parenting (e.g., parental absence) had negative effects on children’s leadership (as rated by their teachers). In addition, constructive parent–child interactions (e.g., parenting that involved displays of affection, nurturance, companionship) were associated with more positive ratings of the children’s leadership by their teachers. Second, and more intriguingly, there were significant gender differences in the pattern of results: Negative effects on children’s leadership were more pronounced when parents and children were of the same sex, and were more likely to occur for daughters than for sons. Given these findings, one might think that the results of Bronfenbrenner’s study would have captured the attention of leadership and child development researchers, producing a considerable body of research on the topic. This was not to happen, however, and the question of family influences on leadership emergence seemed to escape researchers’ attention for most of the next three decades.

Consistent with developments in leadership theories from the 1960s on, the next generation of research on parental influences focused on specific types of child leadership behaviors. Motivated by the early theorizing of John Bowlby about the nature and consequences of parent–child attachment, Annette Towler was especially interested in the influence of specific parental attachment styles on children’s charismatic leadership development.²³ Towler also speculated that higher levels of parental control (which would result in few opportunities for autonomy, responsibility, and mastery experiences for children²⁴ ) would inhibit the development of their leadership.

Like Bronfenbrenner, Towler avoided asking university students themselves about their leadership because of the possibility of obtaining biased answers. Instead, the 81 introductory university students who participated in Towler’s study first completed surveys on their parents’ attachment styles and then engaged in a team activity. After that, each student’s charismatic leadership behaviors were rated by all their team members. The results of this study highlight the parental factors involved in the development of adolescents’ leadership. First and foremost, a secure parental attachment style (with both parents) was associated with students’ use of charismatic leadership behaviors in the team task. Second, higher levels of parents’ psychological control was indeed associated with lower levels of adolescents’ charismatic leadership. However, like other studies showing gender differences, only fathers’ control negatively influenced children’s charismatic leadership; mothers’ control did not. The results of Towler’s study gain added importance because leadership ratings were based on performance on an actual task as rated by peers, and research being conducted at about the same time showed that secure attachment style was related to higher levels of charismatic leadership among military cadets.²⁵

As interesting as the findings of these studies might be, one factor limiting the extent to which they explain the effects of parents’ leadership and parenting behaviors is that they do not rely on parents’ own reports of their behaviors; instead they ask children or adolescents about their parents’ behavior. This could be a concern, because asking people to recollect how they were raised might seem like an invitation for subjective beliefs to creep in and bias the results. However, we need not be too concerned. Anecdotally, most parents (and children) will confirm that it is not the objective quality of parent–child interactions that drives children’s behavior, but rather what children remember about parent–child interactions, and scientific findings confirm this. For example, our research on the effects of parenting (in this case, parents’ job insecurity) on different aspects of children’s behavior all yield the same basic finding:²⁶ Asking parents directly about their own behaviors and experiences provides less useful information for understanding children’s behaviors than finding out how children perceived their parents’ behaviors and experiences. There is every reason to suspect that this would hold true for understanding the development of children’s leadership, with support for this notion coming from Sandra Hartman and Jeff Harris’ study of 195 university students.²⁷They showed that students’ reports of their own leadership (consideration structure) were more highly related to their perceptions of their parents’ leadership behaviors (consideration structure) than were parents’ reports of their own leadership (consideration structure).

Aside from finding that perceptions of parents’ leadership are more influential than parents’ actual leadership, several other lessons emerged from Hartman and Harris’ research. First, students’ perception of parents’ consideration structure influenced their own consideration structure, but perceptions of parents’ more task-focused initiation structure did not influence students’ task focus. One possible explanation for this difference is that children’s leadership behaviors are influenced by their parents, but their task-focused behaviors, which reflect managerial more than leadership skills, are not. Second, parental influences on children’s leadership are specific, with little evidence of crossover effects. In other words, parents’ actual or perceived consideration had little effect on children’s initiation structure. Likewise, parents’ initiation orientation had little effect on children’s consideration behaviors. Finally, there were again important gender differences: Sons were more influenced than daughters, and fathers tended to be more influential than mothers.

Together with my colleagues Anthea Zacharatos and Kevin Kelloway, we were also interested in the effects of mothers’ and fathers’ parenting behaviors on adolescents’ leadership behavior.²⁸ In a variation from earlier studies, however, we asked adolescents to report on their parents’ behaviors in terms of the four dimensions of transformational leadership described earlier, and then obtained data on 112 adolescents’ leadership from three different sources: the adolescents themselves, several of their peers, and their sports team coaches, which allowed for a more rigorous accounting of adolescents’ early leadership. Both male and female adolescents’ perceptions of their fathers’ transformational parenting behaviors predicted their own leadership behaviors within the sports context. However, a gender effect again emerged as adolescents’ perceptions of their mothers’ leadership behaviors did not influence their leadership behaviors.

The studies discussed above were all interested in family influences on leadership behaviors. In contrast, Bruce Avolio, Maria Rotundo, and Fred Walumbwa²⁹ were interested in leadership role occupancy and the unique role of authoritative parenting behaviors (e.g., being consistent, rewarding positive behaviors, being warm and considerate),³⁰ which are positive in nature and different from authoritarian behaviors (e.g., being controlling and unsupportive). They used advanced statistical techniques to remove any possible effects of genetic influences and personality factors and showed that authoritative (but not authoritarian) parenting was indeed positively associated with subsequent leadership role occupancy. However, the effects of authoritative parenting on leader emergence turned out to be even more complex. Avolio and his colleagues also showed that authoritative parenting was associated with lower levels of adolescents’ involvement in modest and serious rule-breaking behaviors, each of which predicted leadership role occupancy very differently. Modest rule breaking (which did not involve violations of the law) had a positive influence on subsequent leadership role occupancy, probably because constructively confronting the status quo relatively early in life, which would likely be encouraged, guided, and supported by authoritative parents, have positive socialization lessons for the long term. In contrast, serious rule breaking (which involved criminal activities such as theft, involvement with drugs) had a negative effect on subsequent leadership role occupancy, perhaps because involvement in serious rule breaking at the same age involves negative peer influences during impressionable years and might exert equally long-term, but negative, effects.

Thus, despite protests from many adolescents that their parents have no positive influence on them, the results of these studies show clearly that notwithstanding any adolescent arguments, parents influence children’s subsequent leadership. But what of other adult role models?

All of the studies considered so far operate as if parents were the only adults who influence the development of their children’s leadership. Of course, this is simply not the case. Other adults also influence the emergence of leadership in children, especially as the children enter adolescence and encounter new adult role models and new peer relationships, as we showed in our study on parental influence on the emergence of adolescents’ transformational leadership.³¹ A full appreciation of the early and diverse influences on leadership development that children encounter thus requires that we look beyond their parents. In doing so, we should be mindful that the effects of different adult models do not occur in isolation but rather interact with each other. Any studies that examine the influence of multiple different role models acting simultaneously on children will be most informative.

The idea that multiple adult models influence children simultaneously is hardly novel. Borgadus had already speculated about the influence of teachers, elderly neighbors, and other family members on children’s leadership development some 80 years ago, and today, parents know this, educators thrive on this, and psychological theories³² emphasize this. Thus, it is more than a little surprising that only one study has focused on the simultaneous effects of different adult models’ transformational parenting behaviors on children. Over the period of a full season, Sean Tucker and his colleagues³³ studied the effects of parents’ and coaches’ transformational leadership behaviors on the on-ice aggression of early teenage boys in two different ice hockey leagues. They showed that when the potential influence of parents and coaches was considered together, only coaches’ transformational behaviors influenced teenagers’ on-ice aggression; parents’ transformational leadership behaviors did not. While not directly relevant to children’s leadership behaviors and potentially limited to adolescents, not younger children, Tucker and colleagues’ results can guide our understanding of the broad range of adult influences on adolescents’ leadership development. A comprehensive understanding of the effects of adult role models on the development of children’s leadership requires that researchers investigate the influence not just of parental models but of other potential role models as well (e.g., teachers, coaches, other family members, TV stars and characters), especially as children grow older and enter adolescence. This point is made more salient because Tucker and colleagues did not assume that the adult who most influenced the adolescent would be a parent. Instead, they asked the adolescent to select the adult who most influenced them—and not all chose a parent! Future research should investigate how these multiple adult role models influence leadership emergence or behavior simultaneously, or in some cases even compete with each other.

Before we move on to consider genetic influences on leadership development, we should note that Bronfenbrenner called our attention to the problem of what social scientists like to call “reverse causality, ” which pervades research on adult influences on children’s leadership development. Within all the studies on parenting behaviors and children’s leadership, the unstated assumption is that different parenting behaviors “cause” the development and emergence of children’s leadership. However, common sense would dictate that the reverse is equally possible: Perhaps children who display positive leadership behaviors encourage and enable their parents to trust them more, use more positive and supportive parenting behaviors, and grant their children greater levels of initiative and independence. Alternatively, when children fail to display mastery, their parents may feel a need to impose further control—a phenomenon that finds some support in the child development literature³⁴ and in early workplace studies that will be considered in Chapter 10 showing that employees’ performance levels affect their leaders’ leadership behaviors.³⁵ While Bronfenbrenner offered a compelling explanation as to why this is not the case with the development of children’s leadership, and this concern is limited to the studies that have used cross-sectional data collected at one point in time (see Chapter 4), we should not merely accept the primacy of parental influence over children’s development—an idea that will resonate when considering the roles of followers in Chapter 10.

So far, we have considered environmental influences (especially parental role models) on children’s leadership development. Research over the past decade, however, has gone beyond a sole focus on environmental influences and contrasted the relative influence of environmental and genetic influences on leadership emergence and leadership behavior. From these studies, we can also start to separate the role of genetic and socialization factors involved in the development of children’s behaviors.

One of the most intriguing techniques for doing so emerged from a chance observation: In 1979, Thomas Bouchard, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota, read a newspaper article about a pair of identical twins who had been separated from each other since they were infants and had later been reunited. Upon meeting subsequently, the twins discovered that they shared amazing similarities that seemed to transcend coincidence: Although they had enjoyed no contact with each other at all, both had married women named Linda, and after they had each been divorced, had later remarried someone named Betty. And the similarities did not stop there. They both owned a dog named Toy, smoked the same brand of cigarettes, held the same kinds of jobs, were involved in the same hobbies and the same activities. Bouchard realized that this scenario presented the opportunity to isolate the effects of genetic effects on their behavior, as having been separated at infancy, these twins shared no environmental similarity. This led Bouchard to establish the now-famous Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart,³⁶ which has amassed a large database of identical twins who were reared apart since birth and were subsequently compared with identical twins who were reared together in their “normal” environments. To ensure methodological rigor, individuals who had been separated at birth underwent careful genetic screening to confirm that they were indeed identical twins before they were included in the data set.

Early indications that this technique could be useful in an organizational context emerged from a study investigating the contribution of environmental and genetic effects on job satisfaction.³⁷ Richard Arvey and his colleagues studied 34 identical twins who had been reared apart since birth and were part of the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart. Participants in this study all completed the well-validated Minnesota Job Satisfaction Questionnaire, which provides information on intrinsic, extrinsic, and general job satisfaction. Even after statistically removing any effects of the characteristics of their current jobs, both genetic and environmental factors explained participants’ intrinsic job satisfaction. While the authors could show that approximately 30% of the variation in job satisfaction was due to heritability, they did not isolate the specific amount attributed to environmental factors.

Despite its promise, several factors limit the potential for this methodology to separate the role of genetic and environmental factors in early childhood development, and thus its usefulness for our understanding of leadership development. For example, the extent to which the results are valid depends on both of the twins being separated at birth, or very soon afterward, and then being placed randomly in different environments. These are extraordinarily stringent criteria, and, not surprisingly, they are not always met. Instead, experience shows that the twins are sometimes only separated as late as approximately 18 months old. In addition, either one or both of the twins are often placed with a family member, thereby potentially weakening the lessons that might be learned. Accordingly, a variation of this technique was developed, in which relatively large samples of identical (monozygotic) and fraternal (dizygotic) twins who were reared together are contrasted, and it is within this framework that the roles of genetic and environmental factors in leadership role emergence, and leadership behavior, have been investigated.

Arvey and his colleagues have conducted several ingenious studies that have added substantially to our understanding of leadership role occupancy. This includes how early in life they assumed such positions, whether individuals hold leadership positions or not, and how much responsibility is inherent in the position they hold. The researchers’ interest in leadership role occupancy was motivated by the fact that holding a leadership role represents the very first step in the leadership process; issues of leaders’ behavior and their success would follow later.

In the first of their studies, Arvey and colleagues’ goal was two-fold: They were interested in (1) whether genetic factors directly predict the likelihood that someone will emerge as a leader and (2) whether personality mediates any effects of genetic effects on leadership emergence.³⁸ Several of the findings of their first study on 119 identical twins and 94 fraternal twins warrant attention. First, genetic factors did indeed predict leadership role occupancy directly. Second, genetic factors also influenced two personality variables, namely social potency and achievement. Although there was no definitive evidence that these personality variables directly affected leadership role occupancy, the authors argued that discounting this possibility is premature, and the issue awaits further investigation. Third, none of the environmental factors that the twins shared (e.g., family socioeconomic status) explained their emergence as leaders, but unshared environmental influences that were unique to each of the twins (e.g., differential parent–child interactions, work experiences) were critical in the development of leadership role occupancy.

Together with a different set of colleagues, Arvey conducted a follow-up study, because their first study had only included male participants; they focused exclusively on women’s leadership emergence in their second study.³⁹ In doing so, Arvey et al. hoped that any understanding of gender differences in leadership emergence would be informed more by data than dogma, and they examined the effects of genetic factors, early family experiences, and later work experiences in their sample of 107 identical and 89 fraternal female twins. The results of this second study showed that genetic factors were as important in women’s leadership role occupancy as they were with the male sample just discussed. Unexpectedly, however, family experiences did not predict leadership role occupancy, but this may have been because the range of family experiences included in the study was limited and nonspecific. Finally, like the earlier study on males, leader emergence or role occupancy was again explained by non-shared environmental experiences of the twins, suggesting that each of the twin’s unique experience within the family environment remained a more powerful determinant of later leadership role occupancy than shared environmental characteristics.

These two studies compared the separate effects of genetic and environmental factors. Recent lessons from the study of behavioral genetics make it clear, however, that environmental and genetic factors interact in affecting subsequent behavior. As a result, Zhen Zhang, Remus llies, and Arvey⁴⁰ extended the earlier research by asking how three environmental factors experienced during adolescence (socioeconomic status, parental support, and parental conflict) might affect the way in which genetic factors influence leadership role occupancy. Their findings emphasize the importance of interactions between genetic and environmental factors: Any genetic effects on leadership role occupancy were much stronger for adolescents of lower socioeconomic status who experienced less parental support and witnessed more parental conflict. Stated somewhat differently, genetic influences on children’s leadership emergence diminished in importance when adolescents experienced more positive and supportive family environments, suggesting that positive family environments may be sufficient to suppress the negative expression of any detrimental genetic effects.

A recent study by Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and his colleagues extends our understanding of genetic factors, by going beyond the traditional twin study paradigm.⁴¹ They obtained their sample from the large-scale National Longitudinal Sample of Adolescent Health (the “Add Health” study)⁴² that initially surveyed over 27, 000 adolescents in the United States in 1994 and 1995. During the third wave of data collection for the Add Health study that took place in 2001 and 2002, information on genetic markers was collected for 2, 574 people. These researchers then identified a sample of 432 identical and 440 fraternal twins who were still involved in the study during the fourth wave of data collection (which took place in 2008). Using the traditional twin study methodology, they first showed that genetic factors account for approximately 25% of the variation in leadership role occupancy. Using the genetic data, De Neve and his research team were then able to isolate a specific genotype that was associated with leadership role occupancy. While their results are strengthened because they managed to replicate the same effect using data from the Framingham Heart Study, which began in 1948,⁴³ the authors caution that we still do not know how the specific gene identified affects leadership role occupancy. For example, it could have a direct influence on role occupancy, but it might also affect the traits, skills, or attitudes that make role occupancy more likely.

These findings are of considerable practical and theoretical importance. From a pragmatic perspective, we have learned that early exposure to a positive social environment can lessen genetic influences on leadership role occupancy, reinforcing the importance of positive environmental experiences and parental role models. From a theoretical perspective, while both genetic and environmental factors play a role in leader role occupancy, and any explanations must take account of interactions between genetic and environmental influences, these studies still highlight the importance of unique environmental experiences.⁴⁴ One additional question is raised by these studies: Because the social influence of peers might well supersede that of their parents by the time children reach adolescence,⁴⁵ it would be intriguing to discover how nonfamilial socialization experiences during adolescence interact with genetic and family influences on leadership role occupancy.

All of the studies investigating the influence of environmental and genetic factors on the development of leadership discussed to this point focused on leadership role occupancy or emergence, that is, whether individuals achieve a leadership position or not. Gaining an understanding of why some people become leaders and others do not is obviously important and an integral question within leadership research. We need to go further, however. Just because genetic and environmental factors interact to predict who becomes a leader in the first instance does not help to explain leadership behaviors or success. While fewer studies exist on the genetic and environmental effects on leadership behaviors (perhaps because the fascination with whether leaders are born or made is inherently a question on leader emergence), some studies have addressed the genetic and environmental influences on leaders’ behavior.

Andrew Johnson and his colleagues⁴⁶ used a large sample of 183 identical and 64 fraternal adult twins to investigate the effects of genetic and environmental factors on a broad range of transformational leadership behaviors. They went further than most studies on transformational leadership, which focus on an overall index of transformational leadership, and analyzed each of the four behaviors of transformational leadership separately. In addition, as noted in Chapter 1, the full-range model of transformational leadership theory also includes transactional leadership (i.e., contingent reward, management-by-exception, and laissez faire), which reflects management rather than leadership behaviors.⁴⁷ More often than not, these aspects are excluded from research on transformational leadership, presumably because they are less effective than transformational behaviors. However, the determinants of transactional leadership remain an interesting but largely unanswered question. Johnson and his colleagues also investigated the genetic and environmental determinants of these behaviors. They showed that while each of the four transformational leadership behaviors were heritable to some extent, the same was not generally the case for the transactional behaviors, which were largely environmentally determined. A follow-up study by Johnson and his team largely confirmed the role of genetic factors in transformational leadership.⁴⁸

Although Sankalp Chatuverdi et al. did not directly contrast the relative effects of genetic and environmental factors, their study is interesting because it investigated how genetic factors and personality function together to predict transformational leadership.⁴⁹ Based on a sample of 107 identical and 89 fraternal twins from the Minnesota Twin Registry, their findings highlight a critical role for dispositional hope, which reflects individuals’ ongoing beliefs that they can find and execute solutions to difficulties they encounter. Specifically, Chatuverdi and colleagues showed that genetic factors indirectly affected transformational leadership behaviors through the intervening effects of hope.

To date, research on the effects of genetic factors and parents’ behaviors has concentrated overwhelmingly on positive or desirable leadership behaviors in children. But, as is clear throughout this book, leadership behaviors can also be destructive, and how bad leadership develops is of at least equal importance. Simply because there is a cross-generational learning of positive leadership behaviors does not necessarily mean that destructive leadership behaviors would develop in the same way, for at least two reasons. First, there may be much to be learned about the development and display of destructive leadership from Albert Bandura’s seminal research on how children learn aggression from role models.⁵⁰ In this classic study, observing aggressive adult models was sufficient for young children to learn the specific aggressive behaviors they had witnessed. However, mere exposure to aggressive models was not sufficient to explain whether children would then act aggressively. Instead, only when children witnessed the role models being rewarded for aggressive behavior were they likely to enact what they had seen. In contrast, when the children witnessed the adult model being punished for aggressive behavior, mimicry by the children became significantly less likely. What this suggests is that children might not simply imitate leaders who are negative role models, and whether they do so or not will depend on the consequences experienced by the role model. Second, as Hartman and Harris showed in their research, children are likely to learn positive leadership behaviors from their parents, but not necessarily task-focused or managerial skills. Thus, we cannot take for granted that poor parenting behaviors might influence children’s leadership development, and this remains a critical question waiting to be explored by both organizational and child development researchers. Surprisingly, there seems to be only one recent study on this issue.

Christian Kiewitz and his collaborators suggested that there is a link between the extent of parental undermining (i.e., nonphysical abuse involving verbal criticism, insults, silent treatment, negative interactions) experienced as a child and later abusive supervision.⁵¹ Consistent with Bandura’s social learning theory, these researchers speculated that regular exposure to verbal aggression and undermining by parents that is seen as acceptable and goes unchallenged will be learned by young children and likely repeated as adults.⁵² Moreover, because enactment of the aggression is seen as an acceptable means of resolving conflicts, subsequent performance of similar nonphysical abusive behaviors are likely to extend beyond the initial context in which they were learned, including to the workplace. Several important and intriguing findings emerged from their research. First, across two different samples, being undermined by their parents was significantly associated with the greater use of abusive supervision many years later. This finding is all the more credible, as the authors did not rely solely on supervisors’ own retrospective recollections of their personal experiences with parental undermining, which may be faulty or biased. Instead, in their second study, siblings of the supervisors provided the ratings of parental undermining.

The second finding from this research may be even more important, as the researchers showed that this effect was not inevitable! In both samples, self-control was an important buffer, such that experiencing early parental undermining was not associated with later abusive supervision for supervisors who enjoyed higher levels of self-control. The implications of this last finding are enormous. We need to be careful not to slip into explanations that favor environmental determinism, that is, explanations inferring that family influences on later leadership behaviors are inevitable. As Kiewitz and his team’s findings make clear, leaders can exercise self-control behaviors to ensure that early negative influences are lessened.

Thus, there are now some data from which we can conclude that adverse family experiences can play a role in the later emergence of destructive leadership behaviors, thus pointing further to the broad influence of family experiences on the development of leadership. At the same time, this study only investigated the effects of parental undermining, and future research should contrast the relative effects of family experiences and genetic factors in generating later destructive leadership. These researchers’ findings also reveal the need to isolate the role of genetic, family, and environmental factors in the development of other negative leadership behaviors, such as unethical leadership on the one hand, or laissez-faire leadership on the other. Findings from different areas suggest that this might be a promising avenue for future research. For example, twin studies have long shown that genetic factors are implicated in the development of aggression,⁵³ and experiencing punitive parenting predicts interactional aggression in adult life.⁵⁴

The next decade has the potential to be one in which significant progress is made in understanding the development of leadership. One of the most rapid advances in the social sciences in the past two decades has been the growth of social neuroscience, which broadly represents the intersection of the social, biological, and genetic sciences and neuroscience.⁵⁵ One important influence on the development of this new body of knowledge has been social scientists’ increasing access to functional magnetic reasoning imagery (fMRI), traditionally the domain of neuroscientists. A study by Jamil Zaki and his colleagues, which focused on supplementing social information on empathic ability with information about its neural bases,⁵⁶ illustrates the potential for understanding leadership development. Using fMRI technology, these researchers located two specific regions of the brain that can be used to differentiate between individuals capable of empathic accuracy, which is central to high-quality leadership, and those who were empathically inaccurate. In a different study, undergraduates in two separate experiments participated in a game in which they received rewards varying in terms of perceived fairness; the situation was made even more interesting because some of the rewards were unfair but financially desirable.⁵⁷ Functional MRI techniques showed that preferences for fairness and unfairness are located in different regions of the brain, as was the decision to accept unfair but profitable outcomes. The results of these studies on empathy and fairness might hold important implications for our study of leadership. Empathic ability underlies successful leadership,⁵⁸ and fairness preferences might tell us a lot about leaders’ behaviors and how followers might respond to their leaders. In time, these same imaging techniques might be useful in isolating the neural underpinnings of other core leadership attributes, such as dignity, optimism, humility, and resilience.⁵⁹

Advances in neuroscientific understanding of leadership would be limited if they were dependent on a particular technology such as fMRI equipment, which is still costly and requires advanced skills for interpreting results. In this regard, Pierre Balthazard and his co-researchers’ study is noteworthy. They performed power spectral analyses using resting, eyes-closed electroencephalograms (EEGs) on 200 individuals who worked as leaders in a variety of different contexts (e.g., education, military, health care, banking, engineering, finance, and the nonprofit sector).⁶⁰ Other individuals (invariably their peers or subordinates) provided ratings of their transformational leadership, which the researchers showed could be correctly classified using neural imaging. Transformational leaders were significantly more likely to have activity in the prefrontal and frontal lobe areas of the brain, which are implicated in planning activities and the ability to anticipate future events, dealing with one’s own and others’ emotions in challenging circumstances, and understanding new and unusual situations. Successful performance of these behaviors is a hallmark of any form of high-quality leadership.

De Neve and colleagues⁶¹ have already demonstrated that with the major strides made in the field of molecular genetics, it possible that we may soon be able to identify specific genes associated with leadership emergence and behavior. This is confirmed by Avi Caspi and colleagues’ large-scale prospective study.⁶² Based on data from the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study,⁶³ they showed that while in general children exposed to maltreatment between the ages of 3 and 11 years of age are much more likely to engage in later criminal behaviors, those who had a specific genotype were less likely to develop antisocial behaviors. One lesson from this research is that genes operate in such a way as to not only leave people more vulnerable, for example, to diseases, but in some cases to protect people from environmental threats.

The authors then used the same large sample⁶⁴ to show that individuals who had experienced a traumatic life event and who had what might euphemistically be called a “resilience” gene were far less likely to develop major depression than their counterparts who had experienced a traumatic life event but in whom the same genotype was lacking. A critical observation also emerged from these findings that will help guide our expectations of what the results of such molecular genetic studies might contribute to an understanding of leadership. Specifically, the presence or absence of the resilience gene by itself had no effect on major depression; it only exerted its protective effects in the presence of prior traumatic life events, resulting in it being referred to as the “resilience” gene.⁶⁵ This observation is very important, as it shows that findings from the field of social neuroscience clearly do not support the notion of genetic determinism, in which genes alone predict social behaviors. Any advances in understanding leadership development are most likely to emerge from the search for interactions between environmental and genetic factors. More specifically, the presence of the resilience gene may ultimately help explain why some people who encounter early adversity go on to enjoy leadership success, while others do not.

A major question that remains is what, if any, are the practical implications of the findings derived from social neuroscience and molecular genetics. While this critical issue will be discussed in more detail in the final chapter, it would be premature to apply any lessons to organizational practices (e.g., leadership selection) before considering what might well turn out to be an ethical and practical quagmire.

Whether leadership is born or made is a question that has intrigued people for centuries, with answers driven primarily by ideology. This question has attracted increasing interest from social scientists over the last 10 years, and we now know enough to provide an evidenced-based answer to the question: The family environment, the non-family environment, and genetic factors all influence who attains a leadership position within an organization in the first place and, subsequently, how they behave as leaders. Gaining a comprehensive understanding of the joint roles of genetic and environmental factors will continue to fascinate researchers, and using the traditional methods of behavioral research together with the new techniques of neuroscience and molecular genetics will help expand this understanding and deliver rich new insights regarding an intriguing and important question. Given that both environmental and genetic factors contribute to leadership emergence and leadership behaviors, the question of whether leadership behaviors can be taught—a question of profound practical importance—looms large, and is the subject of the next chapter.