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Fact Box Level: 9.483 Tokens: 353 Types: 181 TTR: 0.513 |
Know the Ropes
When we think about people who are leaders, we often get a mental picture of someone who is older, smarter, and wiser than ourselves. Studies of leadership, though, have usually found that there is almost no relationship between skill as a leader and traditional measures of intelligence.
Some recent research by psychologist Fred Fiedler and his colleagues suggest that both intelligence and experience may be important—but just how important depends upon how stressful the work situation is and what kind of task is to be accomplished. The researchers obtained measures of intelligence, experience, performance, and stress.
Overall, these variables were not related to one another. Men with high and low intelligence were equally likely to give good performance, as were men with more and less experience, or more and less stress with their bosses. However, when you look separately at those men who have high stress with their bosses, the picture changes.
In high stress situations, there was no association between intelligence and performance, but there was between experience and performance. In other words, in difficult situations, it was helpful to "know the ropes". In low stress situations, the findings were just the reverse: Experience was not related to good performance, but intelligence was. That is, when things are going well, intelligence is very useful in leadership.
A study of fire fighters' performance under high and low stress conditions also found the experienced officers performed best under situations of stress.
None of this is really very surprising. If you have ever had a supervisory job, you probably found that at least as much energy went into handling people as went into handling the job itself. Tests of intelligence—at least the ones we have now do not predict success in handling people.
Short Answer Questions
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