ABSTRACT
Except for one very notable exception, contemporary leadership researchers and theorists have largely ignored the role of intelligence in leadership effectiveness. Among leadership theories of the last thirty or forty years, only Cognitive Resources Theory (Fiedler & Garcia, 1987) regards intelligence as an important variable. This was not always true. Early approaches to the study of leadership were strongly influenced by the apparent success of intelligence tests in the prediction of important outcomes, e.g., performance during military training. Stogdill’s (1948) review of leadership traits, which showed that traits alone were not sufficient to predict either leadership emergence or effectiveness, also acknowledged that intelligence was one of the traits with the strongest association with leadership. (About 35% of the studies involving measures of intelligence and leadership revealed a significant relationship between the two variables.)
In this chapter, I will develop the premise that not only is intelligence a useful variable for understanding the processes that underlie effective leadership, but even more, that contemporary intelligence theories can serve as useful models for similar approaches in leadership research. Indeed, there are intriguing parallels in the research histories of the two constructs. Leadership ability, like intellectual ability, was first regarded as a trait that people either had or didn’t have, and little attention was paid to situational or environmental factors that might mitigate the utility of particular capabilities.
