The heritability of emergent leadership: Age and gender as moderating factors

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The heritability of emergent leadership: Age and gender as moderating factors
The Leadership Quarterly

In this studyweexamined themoderating influences of gender and agewith respect to testing the heritability of leadership emergence. A large data base of 12112 twins from Sweden was used in the current study to decompose the variance of emergent leadership into an unobservable genetic component and environmental components that are either common or unshared among twin pairs. Consistent with prior leadership research on genetics we found that a genetic factor is able to explain a significant proportion of the variation across individuals in predicting how twins perceive their emergent leadership behavior (about 44% for women and 37% for men).  Furthermore we also found that the magnitude of genetic influence on emergent leadership varied with age but only for women with the heritability estimate being highest for the midage women versus lowest for the older women. Implications for advancing research on the genetic and environmental influences on leadership emergence are discussed.

Citation: 
The Leadership Quarterly Volume 23, Issue 2, April 2012, Pages 219–232

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