In Picking Leaders, Intelligence Secondary To Personality, UF Study Shows

July 28, 2004

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Voters choosing a presidential candidate in November because they think he is the smartest contender may overlook other attributes that could be even more important – namely personality, a new University of Florida study finds.

“The best leaders are not the ones who are technically the most savvy,” said Timothy Judge, a UF management professor whose research appears in the June 2004 issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology. “They are the ones with compelling vision who are able to motivate others, and intelligence may not be as critical in formulating that as other qualities like personality or charisma.”

Although some studies have found intelligence to be one of the best – if not the single best – predictor of job performance, braininess is a much less accurate measure of someone’s leadership skills, he said.

“Being intelligent does help a leader, but clearly in and of itself is not enough,” said Judge, who analyzed 151 published studies conducted since World War II and found intelligence to have only a modest effect on leadership effectiveness, assessed across criteria and types of leaders. In other research, he found that extraversion and openness to new experiences were much more directly related to successful leadership than intelligence, probably because people with such qualities tend to be charismatic, which people find attractive, he said.

Leaders with these qualities appear likeable, dynamic and in charge, and that becomes fairly persuasive to the public, no matter what part of the political spectrum a candidate represents, Judge said. While his study looked at general leadership traits, the findings are particularly relevant in politics, he said.

“There is no reason to believe that personality is not at least as important in the political realm, no matter what level office a candidate represents,” he said. “If we think of the great presidents in U.S. history – Lincoln, Washington, Roosevelt and perhaps Reagan – they all were relatively charismatic, visionary sort of leaders, which seems to be the most important characteristic of presidential leadership,” he said.

The ability to present a compelling vision for the future is important in a democracy because politicians must rally public opinion to build support for their programs, Judge said. Leaders who lack that ability will fail, he said.

“People would say that Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan were very different types of leaders. But one thing that I think is undeniably true is that both were charismatic, and they were charismatic to a certain degree because both were extroverts,” Judge said.

For his study, Judge searched the literature for all published studies showing a correlation between some measure of intelligence and leadership effectiveness. A few used the respondents’ perpetual ratings, that is, how smart they felt a leader was, but nearly 95 percent were based on pen-and-pencil measures of intelligence, such as the leaders’ standardized test scores. “We’ve learned through decades of intelligence testing research that these are good ways to measure overall general intelligence,” he said.

Although 90 percent of Americans responded in a Gallup Poll before the 2000 presidential election that the candidate’s perceived understanding of complex issues was extremely or very important to voters, intelligence can be a double-edged sword if it means a leader is getting unnecessarily bogged down in the details, he said.

“President Jimmy Carter, who had been an engineer, was known to have enmeshed himself in details perhaps to the point of losing sight of the bigger picture,” he said. “So in that sense, it’s even conceivable that being highly intelligent may be a bit of a curse.”

Debates are another arena in which people are likely to make inferences about intelligence based on which candidate seems to better grasp the issues, Judge said. But often the public focuses on watching for a candidate to commit some fatal flaw or huge stumble in presenting fine points of an issue, he said.

In his first debate with Walter Mondale, Reagan came across poorly, as someone who did not have a strong command of details, Judge said. “But at the end of the day, any concerns that people had about his mastery of the complexities of leadership were offset by the belief that he was a man of vision who was able to rally people around a particular cause.”

Intelligence could even turn out to be a topic of conversation in this year’s expected vice presidential debates between Sen. John Edwards, Kerry’s running mate, and Vice President Dick Cheney, Judge said, “John Edwards is a very articulate person with experience as a trial lawyer,” he said. “Would people think that he was more intelligent than Dick Cheney? I’m not sure.”

Bruce Avolio, a management professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said Judge’s findings made sense.

“Leaders have to have sufficient intelligence to understand the general complexity of their business so to speak,” he said. “The head of a complex system like NASA has to have sufficient intelligence to be ‘in the game,’ but they don’t have to be a brilliant scientist.”