Leaders engage and inspire others- that is how their work gets done. For the last 100 or so years, we have studied their personality, intelligence, values, attitudes and even behavior. But seldom has anyone ventured physiologically inside of leaders. Advances in fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), access to people and machines, and interest in more holistic approaches to studying leadership have made this possible. This has become so popular and hot that a special issue of Leadership Quarterly is being reviewed right now on the Biology of Leadership (Senior, Lee & Butler, 2010). In this brief overview, I will use a few of our current studies to highlight some of the areas that seem to hold promise.
Building relationshipsResearch has suggested that negative emotions are stronger than positive emotions (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, & Vohs, 2001). As a result, we would suspect that the contagion of negative emotion would ignite a stronger neural sequence than positive emotions. This may serve evolutionary functions but, paradoxically, it may limit learning. Arousal of strong negative emotions stimulates the Sympathetic Nervous System, which inhibits access to existing neural circuits and invokes cognitive, emotional, and perceptual impairment (Sapolsky, 2004; Schulkin, 1999; Dickerson and Kemeny, 2004).
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