The neuropsychological antecedents of transformational leadership

Abstract

Decision-making has received scant attention in the context of transformational leadership, which has emerged as a dominant force in leadership theory with an emphasis on socio-affective domains. Behavioral decision theory and neuroscience provide compelling arguments to examine its decision-making antecedents, by centralizing the integration of affective and cognitive processes in ecologically adaptive and evolutionarily successful decision-making that may be key to transformational leadership. This research effort combines multiple theoretical lenses to offer an alternative, neuropsychological profile of effective transformational leadership in the context of decision-making, by proposing prefrontal brain processes as a key individual differences component. One hundred and five corporate leaders were assessed on classic, scientific and clinically valid neuropsychological indices of decision-making and executive control (attention monitoring and cognitive control) that discretely measure the function of the main neural systems in the prefrontal cortex. The interaction of decision-making with executive control mechanisms, incrementally predicted transformational leadership above and beyond the extant antecedents of extraversion and general mental ability. This broadens our knowledge base by empirically indicating that transformational leadership is predicted by stable decision-making and competence in flexible thinking: in inferring rules, managing goal hierarchies and shifting temporal (now/later) and conceptual(abstract/concrete) contingencies. These neuropsychological results also indicate a biological substrate (in the role of distinct, independent, yet interacting neural subsystems in the pre-frontal cortex) that may underlie these antecedents. To conclude, neuroscience has the potential to specify the neural subsystems that underlie leadership effectiveness; and to provide robust, enhanced measurement of this effectiveness, in comparison to the more global constructs of personality and GMA available in the literature thus far. This cross-disciplinary initiative thus has the potential to offer biomarkers and metrics of leadership that further not only our foundational knowledge of organizational behavior, but also be applied in management practice.