INTELLIGENCE AND LEADERSHIP notes

from

Can Super Smart Leaders Suffer From Too Much of a Good Thing? The Curvilinear Effect of Intelligence on Perceived Leadership Behavior

the optimal IQ for perceived leadership will appear at about 1.2 standard deviations above the mean IQ of the group membership.

analyses indicated that perceptions of leadership followed a curvilinear inverted-U function of intelligence. The peak of this function was at an IQ score of about 120

Individuals who are too intelligent vis-à-vis the group they lead may limit how effective they could be. The leaders may be limited because they: (a) present “more sophisticated solutions to problems [which] may be much more difficult to understand” (Simonton, 1985, p. 536); (b) use “complex forms of verbal communication [and] expressive sophistication [that] may also undermine influence” (Simonton, 1985, p. 536); and (c) come across as too “cerebral” making them less prototypical of the group (cf. Hogg, 2001). This latter point is important to stress because leaders should be representative of the group they are leading. If they are too intellectual, they may appear to be socially aloof or too detached from the group. Important to note here is that we are talking about perceived—and not objective—ratings of leadership.

A striking illustration may be found in the research on the leadership of United States presidents (Simonton, 2012). Even if overall presidential performance appears to be a positive monotonic function of the leader’s intellectual brilliance, the leader’s popularity with the voters exhibits a more ambivalent relationship so that the brightest presidents enter office with narrowest margins of electoral victory. Gibb (1969) once cynically expressed the general conclusion that, “The evidence suggests that every increment of intelligence means wiser government, but that the crowd prefers to be ill-governed by people it can understand”

As mentioned by Pinker in critiquing Outliers “The common thread in Gladwell’s writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition.”