Intelligence and personality as antecedents to leadership effectiveness and extrinsic career success: The predictive power of individual differences

This study was designed to more comprehensively examine individual differences as antecedents to both leadership effectiveness and extrinsic career success. To accomplish this, one purpose of this study was to replicate previous work that had examined the relationships between either leadership effectiveness or extrinsic career success and the individual differences of intelligence and personality. In addition, another purpose of this study was to examine the effects the facets of the five-factor model had on two outcomes (leadership effectiveness and extrinsic career success). A final purpose of this study was to test a mediated model between individual differences and career success.; Data were collected from an international human resources consulting firm that specializes in assessment centers, coaching, and leadership development. The data included personality data, cognitive ability test data, a multi-rater data set used to create a leadership effectiveness scale, a job performance measure, and salary data. Depending on the hypothesis being tested, the sample size was between 630-870 participants. The participants came from a variety of management levels, but they all had some experience leading direct reports.; The results of this study led to both expected and unexpected findings. General mental ability negatively related to leadership effectiveness, which was the opposite of what was proposed. As expected, the construct of personality explained incremental variance in leadership effectiveness over and above general mental ability. Further, the factors of conscientiousness, emotional stability, and extroversion all significantly related to leadership effectiveness, while the factors of emotional stability and extroversion related to extrinsic career success. Many, though not all, of the facets from the five-factor model that were hypothesized to significantly relate to either leadership effectiveness or extrinsic career success did. Finally, job performance did not mediate the relationship between individual difference variables (the factor of conscientiousness, the factor of emotional stability, and GMA) and extrinsic career success. Implications of these findings for theory, practice, and future research are discussed.