Genetics, Personality, and Leadership: Implications for Leader Development and Well-Being

The great man theory of leadership highlights the significance of individual differences (e.g., personality and genetics) in shaping leadership emergence and effectiveness. In this talk, I will briefly introduce our two recent research that challenges and complements this perspective. In the first study, we examined whether becoming a leader will alter one’s personality traits, probing the possibility of reverse causality in the personality—leadership relationship. We found in two national longitudinal studies that becoming a leader from an employee enhanced one’s conscientiousness—an important form of leader development, and the influence was channeled through change of job demands. In the second study, we examined the possibility of so-called “leadership genes” based on a large UK dataset (N = 248,640). We found that the so-called “leadership genes” were also positively related to bipolar disorder and alcohol consumption, and other positive well-being indicators. I will also touch on some possible avenues for future research.

Wen-Dong Li is an associate professor at the Department of Management, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Prior to joining CUHK, he worked as an assistant professor at Kansas State University. His research and teaching interests focus on leadership, proactivity, work design, individual differences, and recently change-related issues in organizational research.

His work has been published in leading management and general science journals including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), Journal of Applied Psychology, and Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, and has also been covered in media outlets such as the Economist, USA Today, LA Times, and South China Morning Post. His research has won several awards including the Hogan Award for Personality and Work Performance from the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, and International HRM Scholarly Achievement Award from the Academy of Management. He is an associate editor for Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, a senior editor for Management and Organizational Review, and Asia Pacific Journal of Management, and a contributing editor for Journal of Applied Psychology. He has also been an editorial board member of other leading management and psychology journals (e.g., Journal of Management and Personnel Psychology).