Center director Sean Hannah, Wilson chair in ethics and professor of management, and his team have released research into the neurobiology of standout leaders. Hannah’s work, published in Leadership Quarterly, reveals that successful leaders have more developed neural networks in the parts of the brain associated with self-regulation, decision making and memory.
Specifically, power spectral analysis measures based on electroencephalograms (EEG) were used to develop and validate a discriminant function that can classify individuals according to their transformational leadership behavior. The analysis was 92.5% accurate in classification of leaders.
This research builds biological support for the popular transformational leadership paradigm and opens a new pathway for future research into the brain biology of leadership, and particularly into the importance of leaders who are “hard-wired” to consider the developmental needs of followers, to encourage innovative thinking, and to solve problems by marshaling a broad range of intellectual experience.
The full article is available from ScienceDirect.