ABSTRACT
Wise leadership is increasingly attracting attention in organizational, management and leadership literature (Mumford 2011). However, the notion of wisdom is still diverse and ambiguous. Determining what constitutes wisdom turns us in the directions of psychology and philosophy: Rooney, McKenna and Liesch (2010) claim that there is considerable overlap between Aristotelian philosophy and the work of contemporary wisdom psychological theorists. While some may find it inappropriate, incommensurate, even disturbing to attempt to measure a concept like wisdom because of its ineffable and transcendent quality (Case and Gosling 2007), there is considerable evidence to show that people believe that they ‘know’ wisdom when they see it (Pasupathi and Staudinger 2001). We propose, then, that to attempt to find human characteristics that might predict the likelihood of wisdom is not an inappropriate practice. For example, most would agree that a reasonable level of intelligence and knowledge is needed to be wise, although all the major wisdom theorists (Sternberg, Berlin School, Ardelt and so on) would strongly argue that it is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition.
