Mission

Leadership is the dynamic process through which some people have more influence on collective behavior and decision-making in groups than others. The psychological underpinnings of leadership have a long evolutionary history as is evident from the presence of leadership dynamics across cultures and species. At the Amsterdam Leadership Lab, we draw on the evolutionary roots of leadership to gain a deep understanding of leader-follower dynamics and their consequences.

The contextual nature of leadership

Our ancestors faced important challenges, like conflict and natural threats, that shaped our leadership preferences and tendencies. At the Amsterdam Leadership Lab, we seek to understand how these ingrained preferences and tendencies influence leader-follower dynamics in our contemporary world. We study both the contexts that result from large, disruptive changes that impact our society as a whole and the more subtle, but highly relevant differences between contexts in organizations. Our research assesses how these contexts affect who emerges as a leader, how the subsequent interactions unfold, and how these dynamics affect outcomes at the group and individual level. 

Biases in selection, assessment, and promotion

Modern workplaces differ in many important ways from the environment in which our ancestors evolved. These differences can lead us to make sub-optimal decisions (mismatch). For example, where our ancestors lived in relatively stable, small groups in which they could observe and evaluate the behaviors of each individual firsthand, in modern organizations we often need to rely on limited information to select and assess the effectiveness of managers and employees. In our research we aim to understand how cues in faces, mimicry and words affect perceptions of people in the absence of more in-depth information about them. Moreover, we use big data and machine learning to pick up on the subtle ways in which individuals and organizations reveal selective information about themselves in written texts (e.g., job advertisements) and formal interactions (e.g., job interviews). We also create tools to help organizations avoid the issues that may result from biased communication and perceptions. For example, we are developing more indirect assessment methods that are less sensitive to social-desirable self-presentation (e.g., serious games) as well as tools to help organizations set more explicit leadership expectations upfront and so avoid biases in the selection of people into leadership roles.

Leadership and team dynamics

Although leadership positions in organizations tend to be relatively fixed, influence processes are more dynamic. Individual differences (e.g., between men and women) affect how people try to influence others and how others react to their influence attempts. However, these differences are often subtle, and their effects may only gradually unfold over time. Studying fine-grained leader-follower dynamics provides insight into who emerges as an informal leader at different times and in different situations, and ultimately into the decisions that are made and why they are made. At the Amsterdam Leadership Lab, we study these types of micro-dynamics using systematic observations, including rigorously standardized coding schemes and combine the insights this yields with data from organizational surveys, experimental lab studies, and large-scale international databases.  

Neuroscientific underpinnings of leadership

The evolutionary roots of leader-follower dynamics suggest they have strong biological underpinnings. At the Amsterdam Leadership Lab, we draw on research methods from cognitive psychology and biological psychology to understand the neuroscience of leadership in organizations. Our close ties to the institute of Brain and Behavior Amsterdam (iBBA) at the VU Amsterdam ensures we have access to cutting-edge technology for performing hormonal, fMRI, and eye-tracking research. Using such novel approaches to leadership research allows us to make important contributions to the understanding of the neural mechanisms involved in followership, the role of attention and information processing in influence processes, and the hormonal changes underlying leader-follower dynamics under different conditions and in different contexts.