Running head: LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 1
Identifying the Leaders of Tomorrow:
The Leadership Emergence and Development in Youth (LEaD-Y) Framework
Jennifer L. Tackett1, Kathleen W. Reardon2, Nathanael J. Fast3, Lars Johnson4, Sonia K. Kang5,
Jonas W. B. Lang6,7, Frederick L. Oswald8
1Northwestern University, Department of Psychology
2Center for Applied Psychological and Family Studies, The Family Institute at Northwestern
University
3University of Southern California
4Wayne State University
5 Department of Management, University of Toronto Mississauga and Rotman School of
Management, University of Toronto
6Ghent University, Department of Human Resource Management and Organizational Psychology
7University of Exeter, Business School
8Rice University, Department of Psychological Sciences
Author Note
We have no known conflicts of interest to disclose.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jennifer L. Tackett,
Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, 2029 Sheridan Rd, Evanston, IL, 60208.
Email: [email protected]
LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 2
Abstract
Leadership traits and behaviors are observed early in development, and although an improved understanding of youth leadership would provide benefits in many contexts (e.g., education, parenting, policy), most empirical work on the topic has been limited to adult populations. This review emphasizes that adolescence is a critical period for leadership emergence and development, highlighting the need to extend current leadership scientific inquiry to younger age groups. The proposed Leadership Emergence and Development in Youth (LEaD-Y) Framework integrates empirical work on developmental science with insights from leadership science. This synthesizing effort reviews three domains that are particularly ripe for synergy: 1) personality and other individual difference factors, 2) interpersonal factors, and 3) broader environmental factors. The relevance of advancing this framework is discussed vis-à-vis the facilitation and prediction of future leadership processes and behaviors, with implications for other important areas of empirical study in leadership science as it pertains to youth.
Keywords: leadership development, youth leadership, leadership intervention, personality development, adolescence
LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 3
Highlights:
• Leadership research has almost exclusively focused on adult populations, despite the clear
emergence and relevance of leadership in adolescence.
• The developmental period of adolescence is marked by personality and interpersonal
changes that have great relevance for later adult leadership behaviors.
• Advancing empirical work on adolescent leadership has implications for selection and
intervention and could better leverage existing resources already devoted to early leadership
but outside of any scientific foundation.
LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 4
Identifying the Leaders of Tomorrow:
The Leadership Emergence and Development in Youth (LEaD-Y) Framework
Although hidden to most, teen leaders are all around us and impact modern society in fairly consequential ways (Tackett, Slowinski, et al., 2019). Importantly, this occurs well before such teens eventually become the adults who successfully found startup companies, guide society toward political change, oversee scientific breakthroughs, and inspire and transform struggling organizations. Indeed, closely observing any schoolyard, high school classroom, or context where teens congregate, allows one to easily identify patterns of leadership and followership. While some adolescents display a natural propensity for influencing their peers’ attitudes, goals, and behavior, others more easily fall into the role of follower. For some, these roles will feel quite fixed, whereas others may shift flexibly between leader and follower across different situations and contexts.
Although leadership begins to develop early in life (e.g., Hensel, 1991; Parten, 1933;
Trawick-Smith, 1988) theoretical developments and related empirical investigations have focused almost exclusively on adults (see Day et al., 2014; Dinh et al., 2014; Lord et al., 2017; MacNeil, 2006;
Murphy & Reichard, 2012). Although several researchers have previously recognized the importance of leadership in youth and adolescence (e.g., Day, 2011; Oakland et al., 1996), this area remains critically understudied. Despite this state of affairs, many stakeholders (e.g., educators, parents, policymakers, employers) are highly invested in understanding leadership behavior early in life and how multiple developmental pathways of leadership develop into knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs; e.g., Ployhart et al., 2014) relevant for leadership behavior in adulthood (Day et al., 2014). Specifically, identifying and understanding adolescents’ developmental pathways into leadership can importantly extend the theory and practice of leadership, especially that pertaining to antecedents of major adult leadership constructs and outcomes, including leadership emergence, group effectiveness, and leader satisfaction (Day et al., 2014). Thus, devoting theoretical LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 5 and empirical attention to adolescent leadership has a range of important theoretical and practical implications.
In the current review, we formulate a framework for adolescent leadership and leadership emergence that uniquely and, we argue, importantly integrates cutting-edge knowledge from the leadership literature with critical insights from developmental science. Specifically, we highlight three broad domains that are particularly relevant and ripe for multi-disciplinary integration: (1) personality and other individual difference factors, (2) peer group and interpersonal factors, and (3) broader environmental factors, including contextual goals and developmentally specific roles and tasks. We highlight these three areas because each has been studied extensively by researchers of adult leadership; yet, all of these areas also have a parallel-yet-underappreciated knowledge base in developmental science (also see Murphy & Johnson, 2011; Popper & Mayseless, 2007). Ultimately, we hope that this framework will inform both theory and practice and facilitate an increase in research on leadership in early life.
Adolescence as a Critical Developmental Period for Leadership
We begin by noting a theoretical justification for focusing on adolescent leadership emergence. In particular, critical developmental periods throughout the lifespan – such as adolescence – represent times of heightened vulnerability due to accelerating maturity or development (Dahl et al., 2018; Steinberg, 2005). These windows are “vulnerable” for both increased risk and increased opportunity for understanding the development of constructs, skills, and tasks salient to that developmental epoch. We argue that there are many reasons to consider adolescence as a critical developmental period for leadership emergence and development.
First, middle-to-late adolescence is a developmental period in which many key leadership traits and processes are emerging and/or changing, including major changes in social dominance and self-control, heightened relevance of the peer group, social status, and peer influence, and increased LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 6 attention to social hierarchy (all of which we discuss in greater detail below; Albert et al., 2013;
Blakemore, 2018; Hawley, 1999). At the same time, adolescence typically represents a critical entry- point into the world of work in most Western industrialized cultures, as well as a time for increased engagement in other sophisticated and complex social groups and networks as found in extracurricular activities, clubs and organizations, and volunteer and activism efforts (Fredricks &
Eccles, 2010). Relative to both children and adults, adolescents tend to show increased social sensitivity across neural, hormonal, and behavioral levels of analysis (Albert et al., 2013; Blakemore,
2018; Hawley, 1999) and are generally more embedded in social hierarchies. Regarding the latter, adolescents also show reasonable consensus when identifying their peers’ levels of social status, competence, and reputation (Fournier, 2009), meaning that they are not only developing their own potential leadership skills; they are also likely particularly sensitive to its development in others.
It seems clear, then, that adolescence is a window of development that offers a critical opportunity for scientifically understanding early leadership emergence, development, and influence on adulthood leadership. Many interesting scientific questions about adolescent leadership deserve deeper scholarly investigation: How early do young leaders emerge? By what processes do teens evaluate one another on leadership-relevant traits such as social dominance, inspiring others, and prestige? What psychological, parental, and peer group characteristics and processes underlie successful leadership in adolescence? Under what contextual and developmental conditions does adolescent leadership translate into successful adult leadership and related skills? A better scientific understanding of these and related questions is sorely needed, along with a framework to guide and organize these early steps. It is to this key objective that we turn next.
The Leadership Emergence and Development in Youth (LEaD-Y) Framework
Just what is leadership? In one sense, the framework we offer for understanding adolescent leadership will help answer this question better than ever before; in another sense, we cannot even LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 7 proceed with such a framework before at least some attempt at answering this question. We will address both senses. Like longstanding research into many other complex-yet-important constructs
(e.g., adaptability, resilience, critical thinking), leadership research provides many different and complex answers to the definitional question about leadership, answers that remain continually discussed, refined, and questioned among experts in leadership science (Campbell, 2013; Dinh et al.,
2014; Hogan et al., 1994). However, most definitions of leadership include three major aspects: the ability to exert social influence, to maximize and coordinate the efforts of others, and movement toward the achievement of a goal (House, 1996; Yukl, 2013). These definitional aspects are relatively specific and useful. Leadership is contextual and dynamic (Day et al., 2014), and arises with respect to a given combination of individuals and in a specific situation, which may contain both facilitating and constraining features that evolve over time (Dinh et al., 2014). This latter point is broader, but it critically recognizes the developmental component of leadership that recommends our current focus on adolescent leadership.
In addition to these definitions, much research has focused on the distinction between various leadership styles, such as transformational leadership, authentic leadership, and charismatic leadership (Campbell, 2013). Scholars have provided a deep and rich understanding of the major components of leadership in adults, particularly in management contexts, and we aim to ground the current framework of adolescent leadership within that foundational knowledge. As mentioned previously, the current review focuses on three domains that we see as particularly relevant and ripe for multi-disciplinary integration: (1) personality and other individual difference factors, (2) peer group, team, dyadic, and other interpersonal factors, and (3) broader environmental factors, including contextual goals and developmentally specific roles and tasks (see Figure 1). Rather than presenting an exhaustive review, we aim to highlight and align some of the key findings from developmental science with areas of adult leadership research that appear to be most ripe for LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 8 integration. Conceptually, we assume that all three areas interact with each other during development. For instance, peer group and interpersonal factors likely affect the development of personality and individual difference factors during the dynamic period of adolescent development.
Likewise, broader environmental factors shape how these developments and interactions take place.
We consider each of these domains in turn.
Personality and Individual Difference Factors
A rich empirical literature has examined the most relevant personality traits (e.g., social dominance, conscientiousness) for occupational leadership behaviors and outcomes in adulthood
(e.g., Campbell & Knapp, 2001; Connelly & Ones, 2010; Hogan et al., 1994; Judge et al., 2002).
Although this extensive empirical literature has focused almost exclusively on adults (with notable exceptions, e.g., Guerin et al., 2011), it offers a rich resource from which to identify those traits in adolescence important for understanding and shaping the long-term development of strong leadership qualities. The adult literature clearly illustrates that personality traits predict leadership behaviors across a broad range of operationalizations (Bono & Judge, 2004; Deinert et al., 2015). In addition, adult personality traits and work experiences (including leadership) exert mutual influence on one another (Roberts et al., 2003). Finally, personality traits, such as agreeableness, may impact leadership performance or effectiveness indirectly, as mediated by specific types of leadership behaviors, such as inspirational motivation, or interpersonal characteristics, such as social skills
(Deinert et al., 2015; Judge et al., 2009). We draw on some of the findings from the adult personality and leadership literature to examine the potential parallel roles of personality factors on adolescent leadership emergence and development.
Social Dominance
The personality trait of social dominance—which reflects a tendency to behave assertively along with a desire to serve as a leader—has been shown to predict leadership behaviors, with LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 9 individuals scoring higher on trait measures of social dominance also being more likely to end up in leadership positions (Hogan et al., 1994; Roberts et al., 2003). Research indicates that social dominance may be one of the most important predictors of potential for leadership skill and leadership success, alongside cognitive ability and other KSAOs found highly relevant for leadership, such as intelligence (e.g., Lord et al., 1986), a finding that is also echoed in some early developmental research (Guerin et al., 2011; Reitan & Stenberg, 2019). Social dominance, or social potency, is an important predictor of leadership potential as tested in military personnel selection batteries, such as those used in the Army’s Project A large-scale selection and classification research in the 1980s
(Campbell, 1990; Campbell & Knapp, 2001). Importantly, social dominance is a more narrowly defined trait subsumed within the broader extraversion domain (DePue & Collins, 1999), and findings on social dominance are consistent with research demonstrating positive associations between the more broadly defined trait of extraversion with leadership emergence and skill (Bono &
Judge, 2004; Judge et al., 2002). In one of the only developmental studies of its kind, Guerin and colleagues (2011) demonstrated longitudinal prospective relationships between youth extraverted temperament and adult leadership measurements, as mediated through adult social skills.
Notably, although social dominance is widely studied in the adult leadership literature, it is rarely included in measures of youth temperament and personality (Tackett, 2019b). This may be partially due to the fact that many measures of youth personality rely on parents’ ratings of their children. As their children’s caregivers, parents are inherently socially dominant over their child, and therefore, they may observe only a limited range of situations where their child interacts with peers.
Moreover, parents may not be very well positioned to judge their child’s level of social dominance compared with peers (or others with a similar developmental status). Although teachers have access to more peer interactions, they are also inherently socially dominant over a child as well, being both adults and authority figures. Unfortunately, the collection of self-report data in children and LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 10 adolescents does not resolve the problem here, because these data face multiple conceptual and statistical limitations (e.g., biases in self-awareness and poor psychometric properties, respectively) that render those data undesirable as stand-alone, or even primary, sources of information (Tackett et al., 2016).
These limitations have hindered the ability to assess children’s socially dominant leadership potential representatively and accurately, resulting in a critical lack of understanding regarding how early social dominance traits emerge and develop. Moving forward from this situation requires several key components. First, sound measurement tools are essential for capturing social dominance in youth as a fundamental component of early leadership capacity. Measures are supported through multiple and continuously streaming channels of evidence, including content relevance (e.g., developmentally sensitive content), psychometric reliability (e.g., high-fidelity measurement across test content, test forms, time, and children from diverse background), validity
(e.g., predicting adult leadership traits and outcomes of interest), and fairness (e.g., not predicting irrelevant outcomes). Furthermore, in service of these measurement goals, it is also highly important to draw on broader developmental investigations of socially dominant strategies and perception of social status and power, which are typically examined in a dynamic and developmental context that includes relational, social network, or social hierarchical characteristics (e.g., Gülgöz & Gelman,
2017; Hawley, 1999). This broad work is not typically investigating social dominance as an individual-level personality trait, as is typical in the adult literature—but it has much to inform it.
Moreover, this literature base only further underscores the need to examine social dominance, and related leadership emergence, within circumscribed developmental contexts (Hawley, 1999).
Self-Control
Self-control reflects tendencies to regulate one’s own impulses and behaviors, and it is another important dispositional characteristic that predicts occupational and leadership success, often LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 11 emerging as one of the strongest—if not the strongest—dispositional predictor of occupational performance when compared with a wide range of other dispositions and when examined across a wide range of jobs and work contexts (Ozer & Benet-Martínez, 2006). Self-control is a robust and strong predictor of leadership emergence and effectiveness (Hogan et al., 1994; Judge et al., 2002).
One prospective longitudinal study found that “academic intrinsic motivation” in childhood predicted enjoyment in leadership and motivation to lead in adulthood (Gottfried et al., 2011).
Although the study did not use a measure developed to assess the trait of self-control, the academic intrinsic motivation variable assessed inherent pleasure derived from cognitive activity, and most likely maps on to personality traits of conscientiousness and openness to experience, particularly as the measurement reflected mastery orientation, curiosity, persistence, and actual learning in school settings.
The tenuous connections in the developmental literature between self-control, or self- regulatory capacity, and the motivation to lead is certainly consistent with the adult literature on this topic (Chan & Drasgow, 2001; Kark & Van Dijk, 2007). Although an important aspect of leadership is persuading others to engage in behaviors that support the group, doing so may require leaders to constrain the environment and/or what employees perceive to be relevant to that which supports the goals of the group. In this way, effective leaders may ultimately extend their umbrella of self- regulatory capacity to the other members of their group (Judge et al., 2004), where members regulate themselves in a goal-consistent manner—and group members also can regulate each other similarly.
As we mentioned previously, psychometrically validated youth personality scales are often lacking measures of social dominance; however, they virtually always include any of several broad traits that reflect self-control. For example, Conscientiousness is a broad trait reflecting intrapersonal self-control characteristics, such as industriousness and orderliness; and it is reliably assessed in children as young as age 3, via parental or teacher report (e.g., Tackett et al., 2012) and as noted, is LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 12 also often assessed in the adult employment context. Effortful Control is another self-regulatory trait found in child temperament measures which also indexes early-forming Conscientiousness.
Importantly, youth Conscientiousness and Effortful Control traits (from personality and temperament measures, respectively) show high empirical and conceptual similarity to one another
(Tackett et al., 2013), yet the refined (facet-level) aspects measured within these broad traits, such as attentional and inhibitory aspects, are not entirely redundant in content. Altogether, this indicates the need for broad and reliable coverage of multiple aspects of the self-control domain, to understand individuals, how they develop over time in terms of self-control, and how they develop as leaders from adolescence into adulthood. Such an integration will benefit from a stronger psychometric foundation, as well as a much more extensive empirical literature base involving convergent, discriminant, and predictive patterns of validity (e.g., Moffitt et al., 2011; Tackett,
2019a).
Social Competence, Emotional Intelligence, and Perspective-Taking
Another domain of individual differences that is likely relevant for emergent leadership includes a variety of characteristics related to interpersonal sensitivity and competency. Within a normative personality trait range, these would largely fall under the domain of trait Agreeableness
(Tackett, Hernández, et al., 2019). Indeed, many relevant social skills develop rapidly during adolescence (e.g., Choudhury et al., 2006; Van der Graaff et al., 2014). Agreeableness emerges in association with leadership less often than the traits previously described, likely because these relationships are complex. For example, tending to be “too nice” —or too submissive, or accommodating—likely reflects highly ineffective behavior for any leader (Judge et al., 2009). Yet, certain aspects of interpersonal competence such as empathy and negotiation are undoubtedly important ingredients for effective leadership. Adult leadership research emphasizes the importance of being respectful of others as critical in transformational leadership, ethical leadership, servant LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 13 leadership, leader-member exchange theory, and across multiple leadership outcomes (Campbell,
2013; Day et al., 2014; Judge et al., 2004). Taken together, the relevance of trait agreeableness and leadership at the domain trait level may mask important discriminant relationships between more refined facets that underlie both of these traits.
Emotional intelligence reflects a large and multifaceted family of constructs that is increasingly investigated in adolescence. Sometimes, emotional intelligence can refer to the self- reported understanding of the emotions and intentions of others; other times it can refer to the outcomes and effectiveness of this understanding (Mayer et al., 2008). Though not without controversy over the nature or even the need for the emotional intelligence construct (Antonakis et al., 2009), emotional intelligence has also been studied widely in the organizational literature in terms of leader self-awareness (Gardner et al., 2005); leaders’ identification and cultivation of trust, optimism, enthusiasm, confidence and cooperation in team members to meet goals (George, 2000); removing method bias from self-ratings of emotional intelligence (Harms & Credé, 2010). Especially interesting is a cascading model of emotional intelligence in organizations (Joseph & Newman,
2010), where emotional recognition precedes emotional understanding, which then triggers emotional regulation and job performance. The cascading model includes personality and cognitive ability variables, was supported by meta-analytic evidence, and overall may be especially relevant to integrate into the framework presented here. Thus, emotional intelligence is a controversial but productive arena of theory and research, and we note how many operationalizations of the construct typically include leadership-relevant behaviors that are worthy of consideration in a broader adolescent leadership framework.
For example, higher emotional intelligence is related to greater peer-rated social competency in adolescence, and adolescent girls (but not boys) identified peers higher in emotional intelligence as leaders (Mavroveli et al., 2007). A potentially related construct studied in adult leadership research is LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 14 leader self-awareness, which includes both 1) perception of self-resources (values, beliefs, behaviors, etc.) and 2) an understanding of how others view you (i.e., meta-perception; Atwater & Yammarino,
1992; Taylor et al., 2012). Research examining such constructs in adolescence, particularly as they relate to leadership capacity and skill, would provide an important bridge between current research with teens and adult leadership research on these topics.
Additional Considerations
Adolescence is a critical period for developing cognitive and behavioral self-regulatory skills, including decision-making and inhibitory control (Soto & Tackett, 2015; Steinberg, 2008). During this period of skill development, there are many opportunities to engage in socially dominant behaviors that are tied to approaching new situations and pursuing and benefiting from rewards.
Self-regulatory capacity has not yet stabilized to adult levels, meaning that the nature and timing of positive and negative feedback from socially dominant behavior can vitally shape and strengthen an adolescents’ profile of self-regulatory capacities. Just as there is this critical intra-individual change, there is also substantial inter-individual differentiation in these abilities—differentiation that may hold the keys to early leadership potential. As noted, and is worth repeating here, measurement challenges can arise when assessing these traits in youth, particularly for social dominance. In addition, these two traits show substantial change across the life course – with self-control developing substantially through adolescence, and social dominance developing substantially in early adulthood (Roberts et al., 2006; Steinberg, 2008).
Personality traits are shown to change in response to work experiences (Judge et al., 2014;
Roberts et al., 2003), and the fact that the teenage years are a common entry point to the world of work indicates that scientific study of these processes must begin before these early occupational experiences. Developmental trends must be incorporated into models of leadership development and have implications for both prediction and intervention. Periods of substantial developmental LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 15 growth may be particularly ripe for both selection effects (e.g., when reliable variance in individual differences is often enhanced) and intervention (e.g., when these traits are most malleable and thus susceptible to change). This underscores the need and opportunity for focused empirical attention on leadership emergence and development during these developmental periods.
Social dominance and self-control are just two key personality traits out of many other traits and states to be considered within an integrative developmental framework for leadership potential, skills, and success. Research on early personality associations with youth leadership must examine traits beyond social dominance and self-control, including other normative aspects of personality functioning which are associated with leadership in adults (Bono & Judge, 2004; Hogan et al., 1994;
Judge et al., 2002). In addition to normal-range personality traits, pathological personality traits are also relevant for adult leadership behaviors, such as narcissism, callousness, excessive disregard, antagonism, and manipulativeness (Hogan et al., 1994; Judge et al., 2009). A developmental extension of this work would find a small but substantial literature on similar traits in youth with which to align (e.g., Reardon et al., 2018; Reijntjes et al., 2016; Salekin & Frick, 2005). A thorough and comprehensive investigation of both normal-range and pathological personality traits associated with youth leadership is an important next step to make progress in this burgeoning research domain. Finally, although we primarily focus here on “non-cognitive” individual differences such as personality-relevant characteristics, cognitive factors—such as verbal, math, spatial, domain-specific knowledge and full-scale IQ—are also highly relevant for understanding leadership behaviors (e.g,
Antonakis et al., 2017) and represent another important target for future extensions of the LEaD-Y framework.
Peer Group and Interpersonal Factors
Leadership emergence and effectiveness can only be fully understood in an interpersonal context (Campbell, 2013; Dinh et al., 2014). Leaders’ knowledge of their group members plays a LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 16 critical role in their ability to manage the group, assign certain members to tasks, and allocate resources in a way that promotes progress toward the group’s goals. Good leaders are also adept at displaying responsibility and commitment; providing concrete guidance and broader vision to subordinates; understanding and furthering the priorities of a group, both internally and externally; and earning respect and trust with everyone in the social system (Chughtai et al., 2015; Searle et al.,
2011).
Related to this, good leaders should also be effective both interpersonally and perceptively; they should be skilled at reading and understanding the verbal and nonverbal signals of others
(Guerin et al., 2011). These ideas overlap with the aforementioned construct of emotional intelligence, but also clearly connect to research involving other interpersonal factors as well, such as adult political skill, which is characterized by influencing others through persuasion and negotiation tactics (e.g., Ferris et al., 2007). Within this interpersonal context, both peer relationships and hierarchical relationships are critical to understanding leadership performance (Campbell, 2013); here, we review both domains from an adolescent developmental perspective.
Relevance of the Peer Group in Adolescence
Interpersonal relationships are one of the most important environmental contexts in which individuals develop, and this is especially true during adolescence (Smetana et al., 2006). In contrast with early childhood, which is dominated by family and caretaker relationships, the transition to adolescence is associated with increasing salience of the peer group (Dijkstra & Veenstra, 2011;
Rubin et al., 2006). Thus, the development of social attention and skills becomes especially important during adolescence, when the peer group becomes the primary relational context (Bolling et al., 2011; Massey et al., 2008; Steinberg, 2008; Steinberg & Morris, 2001). Indeed, research has found greater hormonal, neural, and psychophysiological responses to peer rejection in adolescence relative to childhood and adulthood (Bolling et al., 2011; Silk et al., 2012). Thus, adolescence serves LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 17 as a critical developmental period for social skills and social perception – both key processes that underlie leadership.
Although developmental theories of adolescent decision-making and risky behavior have rarely incorporated leadership capacity and its psychological concomitants, such as social dominance, these theories have prominently featured mechanisms of peer influence and related constructs such as popularity and status (Albert et al., 2013; Brechwald & Prinstein, 2011; Dishion &
Tipsord, 2011; Steinberg, 2008). Adolescents can have a substantial impact on their peers’ behavior, and better understanding these processes could substantially accelerate our scientific understanding of early leadership emergence and effectiveness.
Peer influence on delinquent behavior is particularly high in early adolescence (Mrug et al.,
2014; Steinberg & Monahan, 2007) and can therefore influence the quality of downstream employment outcomes (A. Carter, 2019). Among various factors that moderate adolescent peer influence processes, important roles are played by the status of the influencer—with higher status peers generally exerting more influence (Cohen & Prinstein, 2006; Gommans et al., 2017), and the riskiness of the choice—with safer choices more amenable to peer pressure (Braams et al., 2018), among various factors that moderate adolescent peer influence processes. Even brief exposure to unknown peers affects adolescents’ self-regulation and, particularly in the case of peer rejection, does so by decreasing distress tolerance and heightening loss sensitivity (King et al., 2018). On the other hand, youth with higher social-emotional intelligence may be more resistant to peer influence for risky behaviors (Lando-King et al., 2015), which may also serve as an important early developmental marker for leadership potential. In general, positive effects of peer influence, as we might anticipate in successful or adaptive adolescent leadership behavior, have been studied far less often than have negative effects of peer influence in children and teens (Brechwald & Prinstein,
2011; Dishion & Tipsord, 2011). LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 18
One commonly studied topic in this area is youth popularity, although the relationship with peer influence is not entirely straightforward. For example, aggressive boys may hold central positions in social cliques, even while also being socially rejected (Dishion & Tipsord, 2011).
Importantly, popular teenagers are not necessarily more liked, and popularity and likability may exert distinct effects on peer influence (Gommans et al., 2017). One study of Dutch teenagers found that, although teens who prioritized popularity were not necessarily more popular, teens who both prioritized popularity and were rated as more popular were most highly rated by their peers as a leader (but showed higher aggression, as well; Cillessen et al., 2014). Relatedly, 10-11-year-old girls who were rated high in leadership behaviors and high in relationally aggressive behaviors (marked by interpersonal manipulation and social exclusion), were also rated as most popular (Gangel et al.,
2017). Another consistent set of findings indicated that, in an urban US setting, aggressive behaviors increased both popularity and liking, and relationally aggressive behaviors were associated with higher peer-rated leadership status in middle childhood/early adolescence (Waasdorp et al., 2013).
Thus, although clearly relevant for early leadership emergence and leadership development, popularity, likability, and status are related but non-redundant constructs that must be considered simultaneously in virtually any developmental leadership framework that attempts to be comprehensive and broadly useful.
Another relevant base of research literature has focused on the power of social norms and norm salience in adolescence (e.g., Horn, 2003, p. 200; Killen et al., 2002). This broader literature has paid less attention to the impact of anti-conformity motives, which may also play an important role in understanding adolescent peer influence processes (Brechwald & Prinstein, 2011). One study found that teenagers who occupied a central position in the broader social network and were willing to deviate from peer values and norms showed the most influence on their peers, in the case of clothing-related consumer behaviors (Gentina et al., 2014). Additionally, evidence suggests that the LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 19 susceptibility and impact of peer influence is highest in early adolescence, with a decrease and even resistance increasing across adolescence (e.g., Sebastian et al., 2010; Steinberg & Monahan, 2007).
Taken together, this research suggests that peer influence mechanisms, such as peer pressure, are particularly strong in adolescence, as compared with other age groups, and may even account for many deleterious outcomes disproportionately affecting youth, including increased aggression/delinquency, depression, and obesity (Dishion & Tipsord, 2011). Of course, it is simultaneously easy to examine the role of peer influence as it motivates adaptive behaviors in the group, which is especially relevant for early leadership behaviors (although rarely directly studied).
Given this context, and the relevance of peer influence in successful leadership, adolescence is an ideal time period for examining the ability, susceptibility, and dynamics of peer influence within a broader developmental leadership framework.
Social Hierarchies in Adolescence
One highly important aspect of adolescents’ interpersonal context (as well as leadership more broadly) is the structure and function of social hierarchies. Social hierarchies are virtually unavoidable in schools, organizations, and other interpersonal settings, where hierarchies and the leadership that manages it serve to organize social relationships and coordinate efforts toward reaching common goals (Maner & Case, 2016). Social status is highly context-dependent: an individual may have high status in one group, but low status in another (Anderson et al., 2015).
Importantly, a leader’s social status is largely conferred by his or her peer group, creating a challenge for someone outside that specific social context to easily or accurately evaluate a target youth’s position in a given social hierarchy (e.g., an adult evaluator attempting to rank an adolescent’s social status; Tackett, 2019b). For this reason, it is imperative to understand how and by what processes adolescents rank and organize their own peers. On what basis do adolescents organize their social hierarchies? How much agreement is there in judging an individual adolescent’s status within his or LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 20 her hierarchy? When is social organization more vs. less hierarchical? To what extent are adolescent hierarchies reflective of early leadership traits? Taken together, there is clear reason to think that social status, social hierarchy organization, and social hierarchy navigation in adolescence play key roles in the early development of leadership capacity and behavior.
Adolescence is a critical developmental period for the importance and organization of social hierarchy, offering great scientific opportunity for better understanding leadership emergence and skill. As youth shift from a developmental focus on parents and family to the peer group in adolescence (Rubin et al., 2006), teens are continually engaging in the important activities of identifying, interpreting, and contributing to their social hierarchies, including their own position and that of others. Despite this transitional phenomenon, there is limited empirical research on the formation of adolescent social hierarchies (e.g., Fournier, 2009), although preliminary empirical research suggests that adolescent social status and reputation can be reliably measured and show reasonable cross-informant consensus (Fournier, 2009; Zacharatos et al., 2000).
Adolescent research has historically argued that status hierarchies have positive effects (e.g., decreasing conflict within groups and predicting the stability of relationships), but this view has recently been eclipsed by evidence demonstrating that a “balance of power” view is more appropriate, as power differentials in hierarchies may be harmful to peer relationships and are associated with victimization, bullying, and other forms of violence (Garandeau et al., 2014).
Individuals’ attention to social power can be assessed reliably as early as childhood, with a broad range of power-relevant domains—including giving orders—detectable by children 7-9 years of age, with malevolent power easier for children to detect than benevolent power (Gülgöz & Gelman,
2017). The emergence of social dominance within early childhood peer groups has a relatively extensive research history (see Hawley, 1999), although the methodological approaches examined in early life show disconnect with those typically used in adulthood (e.g., self-reported characteristics LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 21 and motivations), leaving the adolescent period as particularly ripe for bringing these bodies of knowledge together. Additionally, researchers have argued that the desire for status is a fundamental human motive (Anderson et al., 2015), with some support from studies that have found effects for status motives in adolescent and youth populations (e.g., Huo et al., 2010; Ryan et al., 1997).
Increased attention to peer cliques and the use of social network analysis with youth populations will further illuminate this topic, although such work remains scarce, vis-à-vis early leadership emergence and effectiveness. Furthermore, this work may be connected to adult leadership research on topics such as power distance orientation and the conferral of social status in workgroups and teams (e.g., Flynn, 2003). One social network analysis of 11- and 12-year-old youth found that high prestige (as measured by more proximal ties) was associated with prosociality, being well-liked, and being nominated as a leader, whereas high centrality (as measured by the overall network connections) was associated with power and aggression (Andrews, 2019). This represents an important opportunity for additional empirical research fostering a broader developmental leadership framework.
Broader Environmental Factors: Contextual Goals and Social Roles
In addition to personality and peer group factors, a number of broader contextual features likely influence leadership emergence and development in youth. One large advantage of integrating our understanding of leadership with the broader field of developmental science is that developmental research more often relies on a multi-layered and multilevel contextual framework in examining constructs of interest (e.g., Bronfenbrenner, 1977; Lerner, 1991)—children must be understood within the many contexts they inhabit, from families to peer groups to neighborhoods to schools. This is highly consistent with the focus in leadership research on understanding emergent and effective leadership across various contexts—from group composition to specific situational tasks (e.g., Alvesson & Einola, 2019; Dinh et al., 2014; Neubert & Taggar, 2004). LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 22
In addition to this integration of broader context, one of the most important developmental tasks in adolescence is identity development (Klimstra, 2013). As adolescents develop a fully formed sense of self, many associated processes emerge. Of particular relevance when examining leadership development, the adolescent years are marked by an increased sense of one’s personal skills and competencies (those that exist and those were further development is needed), as well as an increasingly crystallized set of values and goals (Eccles, 2009). As children and adolescents engage in the world and develop expectations around their own skills and potential for success in specific domains, they attach different value weights to various activities, which in turn influences both their self-selection and external-selection into various roles and activities, as well as their outcomes across multiple domains (Eccles, 2009; Jacobs et al., 2002; Knifsend & Graham, 2012). One investigation found positive self-concept in adolescence—situated within the context of a supportive family environment—to predict higher transformational leadership behavior later in adulthood, illustrating the general importance of examining self-concept from a contextual vantage point (Oliver et al.,
2011).
Many contextual factors in adolescence are potentially tied to early leadership emergence and development; for example, adolescence is a critical formative period for the development of academic goals, college and career goals, and vocational interests, to provide a few examples. These major developmental processes range from the development of identity and values (Eccles, 2009). to more specific occupational interests, including those captured in the RIASEC approach to vocational interests (Holland, 1966; Tracey & Caulum, 2015): realistic (hands-on oriented jobs), investigative (scientifically oriented jobs), artistic (creatively oriented jobs), social (helping-oriented jobs), enterprising (negotiation-oriented jobs), and conventional (detail-oriented jobs).
Furthermore, many achievement demands are high in adolescence (e.g., pressure to graduate from high school, taking college entrance exams, finding work; Wigfield et al., 2015). These LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 23 achievement demands undoubtedly shape behavior, and these behavioral shifts may in turn shape subsequent forms of achievement motivation (Bleidorn, 2012). The high salience of achievement and occupational pressures during adolescence are likely critical for channeling certain youth into leadership-relevant occupational paths, as well as facilitating identification and development of leadership and motivation to achieve. Thus, their salient developmental relevance will be a useful context for conceptualizing early leadership capacity and development. Future expansion of a developmental leadership framework will undoubtedly encompass many other situations and contexts particularly relevant for teens—and also ripe for examining leadership emergence and effectiveness in youth--including sports, student extracurricular organizations, arts engagement, and charity and volunteer work (Arthur et al., 2017; Eccles et al., 2003; Eccles & Roeser, 2011; Knifsend
& Graham, 2012).
Conclusions and Future Directions
In this manuscript, we set forth the initial prototype of a framework for adolescent leadership that is intended to organize, coordinate, and motivate lines of research at the intersection of leadership and developmental science that we see as having the most potential for early synergy.
Drawing from related, but distinct literatures, we highlighted a number of factors with great relevance and import in adolescent development that also map on to important aspects of leadership emergence and development, across three primary domains: (1) personality and other individual difference factors, (2) peer group and interpersonal factors, and (3) broader environmental factors, including contextual goals and developmentally specific roles and tasks. All of these major domains offer a good starting point for working toward a more comprehensive scientific model of youth leadership emergence and development, and we look forward to future research informing, expanding, and revising the framework offered here. LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 24
Next, we turn to a discussion of potential implications—and applications—of increased research attention to adolescent leadership (for both prevention and intervention) and critical areas for future research (gender, race/ethnicity, and intersectionality; interdisciplinary teams and integrative approaches).
Potential Impacts of Applied Adolescent Leadership Research
One clear need for increased focused attention on adolescent leadership concerns the far- reaching and wide-ranging implications—and applications—of a better understanding of early leadership emergence and development. It is easy to generate an extensive (and non-exhaustive) list of stakeholders who would benefit from a solid scientific evidence base on youth leadership—from teachers, parents, and youth themselves, to policy makers, education administrators, and youth- focused non-profit organizations, to organizations, recruiters, and anyone invested in the leaders of the future. Indeed, many of these stakeholders are actively involved in the application of youth leadership (e.g., attempts to select individuals on early leadership potential for jobs, the military, university admissions or the myriad “interventions” already implemented in middle and high schools aiming to develop early leadership capacity), but without an existing scientific base to draw on. The resources already being invested in this topic further underscore the immediacy of this type of work—many stakeholders are in immediate need of a scientific understanding of youth leadership emergence and development.
Implications for Selection
Leadership emerges from a complex suite of traits and experiences that develop through adolescence and into adulthood, making it challenging to select for high-quality leaders and leadership in the workplace effectively. As if selecting on multiple traits were not complicated enough, the leadership behaviors to be selected on are also clearly multidimensional, given that leaders manage tasks, interpersonal relations, and change within the organization (Yukl et al., 2002), LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 25 each of which may benefit from somewhat different sets of leadership traits and skills. Furthermore, leaders are influencing the very situations, behaviors, and teamwork that they then end up leading
(e.g., managing internally, representing externally).
Keeping this multidimensional appreciation of leadership selection in mind, we propose to move the research agenda on adolescent leadership forward in multiple ways. First and foremost, research and practice partnerships can consider how individual leadership characteristics map onto academic and workplace behaviors, either directly (e.g., their own time management behaviors) or indirectly (e.g., inspiring subordinates to manage their time and meet goals). Within organizations, this sort of mapping is often undertaken by industrial-organizational psychologists via job analysis techniques (Morgeson et al., 2019); but a wider range of psychologists should be involved when considering this mapping more broadly, within a developmental framework of lifespan, career, and leadership development, that incorporates both schools and organizations, e.g., developmental, educational, industrial-organizational, school, and vocational psychologists.
Second on the research agenda is to develop leadership interventions that will improve adolescent’s chances for selection into roles that fit and contribute to their growing multidimensional leadership talents—even when they are not yet assigned to a formal leadership role at work. Accomplishing the aforementioned mapping effectively is an essential prerequisite for measuring adolescent’s leadership strengths and weaknesses most effectively, to then better identify and implement effective interventions that ultimately improve their leadership capabilities. Every adolescent can benefit, formally and informally, from leadership development activities that take place in a developmentally sensitive manner. This is a long-term investment strategy that will stand to improve job applicant pools for all organizations engaging in selection, even improving workforce readiness and the national economy at a collective level. LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 26
Third is to continue to engage in and strengthen longer- and broader-term thinking in selection research that merges developmental and organizational psychology, where adolescents are eventually selected for training (college, technical training), then are selected to become employees; and with accumulated experience many employees are selected into a series of formal leadership roles. Employers should at least support the ideas toward the end of this pipeline, where even when organizations are not selecting directly for a leader, they benefit greatly from selecting applicants with leadership capabilities (e.g., showing effective task support, empathy, and teamwork), who are
(a) more likely to be effective informal leaders in a group, who (b) may also be more willing and able to develop themselves into more formal management roles in the future, and who (c) are more likely to contribute to the accomplishments, climate, support, and management within organizations.
Here, selection and leadership development should be considered alongside a broader array of interrelated activities that organizations undertake to cultivate their leadership talent: e.g., recruitment, management, training, teamwork, and incentivizing. But selection is critical, because it happens by default if not by design, where that which is not selected for is likely to vary more strongly and might need to be managed more carefully to avoid risk.
Implications for Intervention
Organizational investment in executive coaching and other forms of leadership training is massive in size and scope, across business sectors and regions, with the global leadership training industry valued at $366 billion (Westfall, 2019). Although training leaders is a big and important business, many if not most of these intervention efforts fail by any reasonable empirical standards
(Beer et al., 2016), assuming those even exist. Perhaps this state of affairs (and not the mentality of never settling for success) is why over 50% of senior leaders end up unhappy with their results
(Moldoveanu & Narayandas, 2019). We propose that leadership training could provide a much better return on investment if a longer-term developmental and systems approach to leadership was LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 27 taken, where its implementation started much earlier, namely during adolescence. As mentioned previously, adolescence represents a time of immense developmental change, where malleability of thoughts, behaviors, and their underlying neural substrates—and thus, susceptibility to the influence of leadership-related interventions—is at its highest. Perhaps most importantly, adolescence is a time where personal identity is most malleable and open to experimentation and change. Identification as a leader, or as one who could be a future leader, is crucial to the enactment of leader-related behaviors; but by the time individuals reach adulthood, their identities, knowledge, and assumptions in the leadership domain are often quite fixed, which can make the transition to first time leadership fraught with anxiety, threat, and conflict (Yip et al., 2019). If people have the opportunity to experience and experiment with leadership development during adolescence allowing themselves to explore, succeed, and fail—then there is a greater chance that leadership will become incorporated into a stable and enduring sense of self. The time is ripe for direct intervention and could lead to longer lasting change than leadership training efforts aimed at adults.
Adolescence is an important time for the development of career aspirations and vocations, so parents and educators should identify, attend to, and cultivate underlying leadership and followership competencies in adolescents. But note that there might be a happy medium for the appropriate amount of parental support: overparenting, which might be perceived as a form of close adult intervention, may actually restrict youth leadership emergence, in part through negative experiences and subsequent impacts on self-esteem and self-efficacy (Liu et al., 2019; Yip et al.,
2019). Thus, with the right amount of parental and social support, early intervention can help to put kids on the appropriate “leadership track”, thereby increasing the pool of future leaders. Further, the development of specific skills and activities in adolescence is likely linked to future leadership outcomes. Identifying and developing these parental and situational support as precursors to fostering, if not accelerating, future leadership success is a very fruitful area for future research. LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 28
Childhood and adolescence are also extremely promising in terms of training effective follower behaviors, with the understanding that leadership and followership resides within each person, not merely across them. Followership behaviors are extremely important to the success of teams and organizations and should be studied more often in the context of successful leadership
(e.g., Boerner et al., 2007; Dvir et al., 2002). If we can teach more children and adolescents to develop effective leader and follower behaviors and roles, and to move between them skillfully and flexibly, we can then enhance the benefits of leadership throughout an organization, perhaps lowering the burdens for any individual leader in a way that, collectively, contributes to workforce sustainability and lower levels of burnout. To be clear, this idea is more than just improving teamwork; it is about encouraging distributed and diverse forms of leadership. Teaching people how to shift easily back and forth between leader and follower, in ways that accommodate and complement their domain-specific strengths and weaknesses, is an important form of leadership for supplementing (perhaps supplanting, in some cases), the role of a formal leader.
Leadership intervention during childhood and adolescence is by no means a novel idea.
Indeed, schools, clubs, and other youth organizations routinely work toward developing leadership and leadership potential among children and adolescence. It seems to be well-recognized that youth is a good time for intervening on leadership, but the scientific evidence for best practices is lacking.
Thus, important next steps in this area might include, for example, testing interventions which: identify and foster leader and follower behaviors which are linked to important outcomes in youth and adulthood; capitalize on malleability of identity, thoughts, and behaviors to develop strong leader and follower identity and ability; and help youth recover from and build resilience to withstand negative experiences and failures in the leadership domain.
Critical Areas for Expanding the Framework LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 29
As noted, we put forth the current framework as a starting point for a broader organization and coordination of leadership in youth. We anticipate that, as research in this understudied intersection increases, the model will be revised and expanded. Here, we offer two areas that we see as requiring immediate integration into our framework: (1) gender, race/ethnicity, and intersectionality, and (2) the importance of interdisciplinary teams and integrative approaches.
Gender, Race/Ethnicity, and Intersectionality
We have previously considered how research might address leadership diversity in terms of psychological features (e.g., knowledge, personality, interests). Future research should also consider the linkages between adolescent social development as it pertains to demographic diversity, with special attention to gender and race/ethnic minority groups, given their protected class categories
(Title VII), as well as the combination of these categories (i.e., intersectionality).
Regarding gender, the theory of gendered organizations takes the strong position that biased social hierarchies are what permeate and power workplace cultures that tend to favor the careers of men over those of women (Acker, 1990). Broader investigations are needed, that examine how gender and race-imbalanced leadership structures and hierarchies can be changed (if not disrupted), given the hopeful presumption that organizations are striving for fairness and accountability mechanisms that strongly support equality of opportunities—and equality of outcomes—for all people, regardless of demographics (Tetlock & Mitchell, 2009). In this context, adolescent females develop their identities in the context of both real and perceived leadership biases against them, leading to role incongruity effects (Eagly & Carli, 2003), given the strong existing and incoming evidence that women are just as effective leaders as men (Sanchez-Hucles &
Davis, 2010).
To explain this phenomenon, Eagly and Carli (2003) argued that women face a double bind, meaning that they are often not only penalized for engaging in communal (i.e., warm and nurturing) LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 30 behaviors expected of women; they are also penalized for engaging in agentic (i.e., assertive) behaviors expected of men. For women leaders or women with leadership aspirations, communal behaviors can be often viewed as a sign of weakness, and agentic behaviors can be often viewed as overly aggressive or combative (Eagly & Carli, 2007). Yet, meta-analytic evidence suggests that women are more transformational than men, engage in more contingent reward behaviors than men
(being a positive transactional leadership component), and are less likely to engage in the less effective components of transactional leadership or laissez-faire behaviors than men. Thus, socially learned expectancies affect women’s leadership behaviors negatively, yet women leaders also tend to exhibit several uniquely positive leadership characteristics compared with men. Research that captures how female adolescent leaders internalize or reject social expectancies may explain individual differences in women leader behaviors and the mechanisms that support women leaders in surpassing gendered expectations. Moreover, a developmental, organizational, and sociological approach in this line of research may support a multidisciplinary understanding of why gendered social hierarchies persist in many organizations.
Intersectional adolescent leadership research would also be beneficial in understanding how adolescents can leverage their multiple, distinct identities (e.g., race, gender identity, ability, or sexuality) as they are developing their leadership capabilities. Understanding how intersectional- specific identity stereotypes can undermine (or facilitate) leader emergence, or how one is viewed by others, is useful to science and practice. Extending our discussion of gender, women of color are subject to role congruity principles in addition to stereotypes unique to their race. Indeed, Black and
Asian women are both more likely to face organizational penalties for agentic behavior than are
White women, with the severity of the penalty being tied to stereotypes unique to their respective racial categories (Rosette et al., 2016). Their results support Eagly and Carli’s (2007) argument that women of color, more than white women, are likely to be forced to navigate a labyrinth of unique LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 31 social expectations that require balancing demands on agentic and communal behaviors, while also creating social investment opportunities that yield social capital. As such, leadership barriers for women of color extend beyond the previously mentioned double bind situation.
Because intersectionality reflects the process and outcomes of integrating multiple identities to construct one’s social reality (Cole, 2009), an intersectional research agenda is apt to highlight the combinations and interactions of multiple social categories (e.g., gender, race, sexuality) in developing leader identity and engendering identity-related leadership outcomes (Sanchez-Hucles &
Davis, 2010). Given the evidence that leadership behaviors emerge during adolescence during its critical period for identity development, adolescent leadership research may be advanced by adopting an intersectional lens and exploring how unique stereotypes develop over time, the processes by which individuals with multiple identities integrate their unique identities, and variance in how intersecting stereotypes and biases might amplify or attenuate one another in affecting leader emergence and effectiveness.
Interdisciplinary Teams and Integrative Approaches
Research on leadership has long been interested in understanding why certain people become leaders, either formally or informally, and how they influence others in group environments, particularly longer-lasting team environments (e.g., Barsade, 2002; Cronin et al., 2011; Hausknecht,
2017; Humphrey & Aime, 2014; Morgeson & Hofmann, 1999). Research in this area is methodologically challenging because of the inherent multilevel and longitudinal nature of the data, with measurement occasions nested within team members, team members nested in groups
(Kozlowski, 2015; Kozlowski et al., 2013; Lang, Bliese, & Runge, 2019), and cross-classified nesting when members switch teams (Rapp & Mathieu, 2019). Historically, research in this area had primarily adopted a relatively static approach that focused on studying leaders and followers with pre-assigned roles. However, recent years has seen great theoretical and also methodological LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 32 progress, as researchers have not only used multilevel and mixed-effects models natural to the team structure (Lang, Bliese, & Adler, 2019; Lang et al., 2018); they have also supplemented these models with more intensive use of qualitative methods (Gehman et al., 2013), network methods (e.g., D. R.
Carter et al., 2015; Jones & Shah, 2016), and computational models (Newman & Wang, 2019) and to track work groups and teams over time. No matter the methods used, team research has become increasingly focused on studying fixed (time-invariant) and varying (time-varying) measures of individual and contextual differences as predictors of leader centrality in influencing the opinions, affect, and performance of team members as the leadership process unfolds over time.
In a similar vein, interdisciplinary and integrative approaches to studying adolescent leaders could apply these methods, such as by forming project groups in schools and tracking these groups over time, where the characteristics of schools, teachers, classmates can influence student leader emergence. This type of research may be especially fruitful for its naturalistic approach: e.g., the types of attitudes, emotions, behaviors, and impression management tactics that occur in the social hierarchy of adolescence may or may not align with similar characteristics in the employment context (interview and job performance). This type of research might valuably inform many areas of organizational research, for instance, the increase of more informal and less structured work hierarchies and environments, especially in start-up companies, where employees also tend to be younger. This is but one example out of many, where more generally, we believe that casting a wider net of types of leadership skill and potential by building on work on early leaders could advance leadership researchers’ understanding of group phenomena.
Conclusion
Leadership propensity and motivation clearly emerge much earlier in life than adulthood, when leadership ability and effectiveness have primarily been studied. Yet, very little is known about the scientific underpinnings of early leadership – whether leadership looks the same in children as in LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 33 adults, how these early behaviors develop and may be further facilitated or encouraged, and the ways in which these phenomena in early life may turn into later leadership behaviors in adulthood.
Although leadership is not a common topic of inquiry for those studying children and adolescents, many vibrant areas of developmental science clearly intersect with leadership emergence and development. In the current review, we highlighted existing scientific knowledge on youth personality and motivational characteristics, peer group and interpersonal factors, and broader contextual factors, with an eye toward areas of potential synergy with current research on adult leadership. Our aim was to present an early working framework to advance the study of leadership emergence and development in youth: the LEaD-Y.
The implications of expanded empirical attention to child and adolescent leadership are diverse and impactful; we highlighted some of this potential here, including importance for selection, opportunities for intervention, integration with evolving knowledge on the impact of gender, race/ethnicity, and intersectionality, and connections with growing work on leadership evolution in teams and organizations. Better understanding the nature of leadership potential in adolescence is highly consequential for developing and predicting future leadership, as well as for understanding and intervening on the course of individual careers, the nature and dynamics of organizational behavior, and even broader characteristics of the labor force and national economy. In addition to many potential applied impacts of a larger scientific base on early leadership, integrating the currently disparate domains of leadership and developmental science creates a synergistic opportunity to identify biological, social, and contextual correlates of leadership capacity and development. We hope this review provides an early structure to such an integration, stimulating more scientific thinking and knowledge on this critically important multidisciplinary topic in leadership science.
LEADERSHIP IN ADOLESCENCE 34
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Figure 1
An illustration of the LEaD-Y framework and its constituent domains.