What is it about?

Widespread narratives about leadership often emphasize the importance of exhibiting agentic traits like assertiveness, ambition, and confidence. Counter to this perspective, we find that when evaluating leaders, followers especially value communal traits, such as honesty, open-mindedness, and compassion—even at the expense of agentic traits. Eight studies reveal that people describe their ideal leader as more communal than the typical leader, representing a divide between preferred versus prototypical leaders, and that people are willing to trade off low agency in a leader for high communality.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

As high-profile business leaders declare that organizations need more "masculine energy," the current work suggests that this perspective may fail to account for the experiences of followers. Although the media and academic scholarship have tended to emphasize traditionally masculine, agentic traits as crucial for effective leadership, we find a robust preference among followers for leaders that exude traditionally feminine, communal traits.

Perspectives

The opportunity to collaborate with one of my best friends was such a treat! The idea for the project started when we were grad students, chatting about the leaders who had truly impacted us. These were people who cared about us, were willing to keep an open mind, and who we could trust - in other words, highly communal leaders. It's been incredibly rewarding to see what started as some half-baked voice notes sent back and forth blossom into a publication that will hopefully push people to think a bit differently about leadership.

Rebecca Ponce de Leon
Columbia University

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: The preeminence of communality in the leadership preferences of followers., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, February 2025, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/pspa0000437.
You can read the full text:

Read

Contributors

The following have contributed to this page