Sofya Isaakyan

Prior voice research highlights the leader-like nature of voice behavior and shows that those who speak up with change-oriented ideas, concerns, and opinions enjoy enhanced status and emerge as leaders in their groups—especially when voicing individuals are men. Acknowledging that perceptions of leadership are not only external, but also internal, we ask whether voicing individuals are more likely to see themselves as leaders—that is, whether voice behavior positively affects their leader identity. This is especially important from a gender perspective, because building a strong leader identity is a challenging and critical developmental task for women. Drawing on the behavioral perspective of identity construction, we propose that voice behavior enhances leader identity, and that such benefits are particularly pronounced for women whose voice is endorsed. Furthermore, we propose that over time, leader identity has positive downstream effects on how others evaluate the leadership effectiveness of voicing individuals. Findings from two studies—a field study using a within-person repeated measures design and a pre-registered experiment—support our conceptual model. Our results delineate unique intrapersonal benefits of voice for women and provide novel insights into how individuals and organizations can maximize the benefits of voice for leadership development.

Annika Frach

Working hard is perceived as a valued behavior. However, working hard may develop into workaholism, which is a syndrome that is associated with many negative mental and physical problems that are known to undermine performance and well-being in the workplace. The topic has stimulated many publications on its prevalence, personality predictors, and cultural invariance. Unfortunately, concomitant with the number of publications, the number of workaholism measures has increased dramatically, limiting between-study comparison. Therefore, this study aims to provide a much-needed update and proposal on the conceptualization and operationalization of workaholism. For the operationalization of workaholism, we systematically searched for all published workaholism measures and their items. We processed identified items using an R-coded algorithm to select a representative item subset that considered semantics and item quality. In a cross-sectional online study, we administered the selected items to a sample of 461 participants. We used a second algorithm to select items with good convergent and discriminant validity. A factor analysis on this subset yielded a three-factor solution consisting of Work-Life Tension, Work Overinvestment, and  Work Overdependency. Lastly, we used a greedy search algorithm, semantic overlap, and item correlations to select the five least tautological items for each factor. Together, the five items from each factor form a new Core Workaholism Scale. In the discussion, we reflect on the data-driven objective approach, how our three dimensions connect to previous theories, and how to use the Core Workaholism Scale in organizational and clinical research.

Emma Gerittsen & Djurre Holtrop

Destructive leadership behaviors have serious consequences for both organizations and employees, yet their emergence remains largely understudied. Current research predominantly focuses on the employee’s perspective, offering a limited view of how destructive leadership behaviors arise. To develop a more comprehensive understanding, it is crucial to also consider the leader’s perspective. Given the scarcity of research from this viewpoint, we employed a qualitative approach to explore how leaders retrospectively make sense of their destructive leadership behaviors. We conducted 25 semi-structured interviews with leaders from diverse hierarchical levels and industries in the Netherlands. Using the Gioia methodology, we developed a theoretical model explaining destructive leadership behaviors based on the leader’s viewpoint. Our findings reveal that leaders often navigate conflicting demands from organizational, team, employee, and personal interests, and frequently rationalize their destructive actions as necessary responses to these pressures. Furthermore, specific factors within leaders’ subjective realities—such as work stressors, value-based discrepancies, and perceived performance deficiencies—contribute to enabling these behaviors. Compared to the employee-focused view, our study provides unique insights into how leaders reflect on their own shortcomings and misperceptions that partially explain their engagement in destructive behaviors. By integrating the leader’s perspective, our study shifts the focus from static, trait-based explanations to a more dynamic understanding of how destructive leadership behaviors emerge, offering new insights for both research and practice.

Bo Wang

Communicating commitment to specific organizational cultures (e.g., integrity or ethical culture) to job applicants is a common marketing strategy for organizations seeking to attract talent. However, previous research suggests that organizations may strategically misrepresent their stated organizational culture. Notably, there is a negative relation between advertised and actual ethical culture—organizations that claim a commitment to an ethical culture are more likely to operate unethically in practice. In this study, we explore an overlooked negative consequence of such an inconsistency between stated and actual ethical culture on organizational attractiveness. We conducted a vignette-based experiment using a 2x3 between-subject design. The first factor was manipulated by Vignette 1, which simulated a company’s overview in a recruitment advertisement. This advertisement presented the company as committed to either both ethical and customer-oriented cultures (Ethical Advertisement condition) or solely a customer-oriented culture (Non-Ethical Advertisement condition). The second factor was manipulated by Vignette 2, which simulated employees or managers reviews of the company, describing its culture as either ethical (Ethical Review condition), unethical (Unethical Review condition), or efficiency-oriented without mention of ethics (Non-ethical Review condition) culture. Six hundred participants were recruited to complete the HEXACO personality inventory and then rate the company on perceived moral hypocrisy, behavioral hypocrisy, and organizational attractiveness after reading Vignettes 1 and 2. Compared to all other conditions, the company in the Ethical Advertisement-Unethical Review condition was rated higher on both moral hypocrisy and behavioral hypocrisy, which were in turn associated with lower organizational attractiveness. Despite strong theories and solid empirical evidence suggesting that people high in HEXACO honesty-humility have a preference for ethically sound organizations, we did not find this personality trait to moderate the relations between perceptions of moral hypocrisy or behavioral hypocrisy and organizational attractiveness. We welcome any insights that may help explain these surprising findings.

Florence Bernays

Charismatic leaders have been depicted as heroic figures who are “endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities” (Weber, 1968; 241) because they leave people mesmerized by signaling charisma (House & Shamir, 1993). While existing research paints an overly positive picture of charisma, we highlight a potential dark side of taking people under the spell. In six randomized experiments with more than 600 participants in which we manipulated charisma, we found evidence that charisma disrupts memory in such a way that people become susceptible to recalling information that was never presented but is consistent with the speaker's message, leading to the creation of memories. In addition, we find that although people exposed to charisma have faulty memories, they are more convinced that their memories are actually true. Finally, we show that the more convinced people were that their false memories were true, the more likely they were to support the speaker's political campaign and the more money they were willing to spend to meet the speaker. Our findings reveal a dark side of charisma that may explain why people choose to follow those leaders blindly.

Leonie Raijmakers

The rapid growth and diversification of research and data in online environments over recent decades has revealed the limitations of the current publishing system in meeting the needs of modern research. In response, DeSci Labs has developed open-source software that enables researchers to share manuscripts, data, code, and other outputs as versionable research objects with persistent identifiers on a decentralized peer-to-peer network accessible to all. This system leverages advanced web3 infrastructures, including the newly upgraded Publish by DeSci Labs, built on the CODEX framework.

DeSci Publish simplifies and incentivizes the adoption of best open science practices while offering enhanced features for effective knowledge sharing, both now and in the future. Notable innovations include a streamlined upload process that consolidates different research components and generates a link for journal submissions, incorporating related data and code. Additionally, a machine learning feature estimates an article's novelty and potential impact. Leonie will guide you through these features, from the basics to the groundbreaking ML-based tool introduced in September.

Ard Barends

Research demonstrates that more than half of job applicants are asked whether they have a criminal record at some point during the selection process, and the use of criminal background checks is ever growing. Given the many restrictions they face on the jo market, this suggests ample and convincing proof that people with a criminal pas make poor employees. However, a synthesis of the relevant empirical research on this topic is lacking. Therefore, the current systematic literature review attempts to give an overview of research investigating whether people with criminal records differ from those without such criminal records in their on-the-job behaviors, such as task performance, counterproductive work behavior, and turnover. The relatively scarce literature on the topic seems to suggest that a criminal history is positively related to counterproductive work behavior, unrelated to task performance, and negatively related to turnover. The results of this systematic literature review allow for a critical reflection on the current steep rise in criminal record checks, as well as policy initiates like Ban-the-Box, in order to increase successful employment outcomes for both employer and employee. Above all, they manifest the need for more research that allows for an accurate view of how employees with a criminal record behave on the job.

Sasha Cook

Organizations spend large sums every year on the health of their employees, often informed by theories and insights from occupational health psychology. However, given that one-third of the population of working age has at least one chronic health condition, the question arises whether the existing efforts in research and practice pay enough attention to health diversity it the current workforce.

In this talk, I will present insights from my research on employees with various chronic health conditions to highlight relevant existing problems in the work experience of people with impaired health status, identify open questions regarding the generalizability of existing theories and intervention approaches for occupational health and burnout, and discuss possible avenues for research aiming at a more inclusive approach to healthy working.

Jian Shi

Hybrid work, especially in the split-week model, has become the “new normal” of working arrangements since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Considering its dramatic increase and use, it is important to understand how it impacts employees’ psychological experiences and work outcomes. While many studies have focused on the benefits, the present research identifies important barriers to remote and hybrid work. In particular, employees on remote working days will feel the loss of identification and isolation within the team, compared to in-office days. These feelings, in turn, lead employees to engage less in and withdraw more from their work and decrease their effort to help others and generate creative ideas for their work. In addition, we examine whether identity leadership buffers the negative impact of daily remote work on employees’ psychological and behavioral outcomes. To test the hypotheses, we conducted a daily diary study among 112 hybrid workers in the U.K. to sample their daily remote work experiences over five consecutive workdays. Results largely supported our predictions. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings, thereby promoting a more flexible and dynamic hybrid work.

Lara Engelbert

Charismatic leaders are exceptionally effective in increasing the performance of individual workers. We propose that charismatic leaders do so by increasing workers’ attentional focus. Using two cognitive paradigms (Study 1, Rapid Serial Visual Presentation task, N = 123; Study 2, Flanker task, N = 938), we tested our attentional focus hypothesis in two online samples. In Study 1, the charismatic leader manipulation had no significant effect on reaction times. In Study 2, we addressed some major limitations of Study 1 and tested our hypotheses in a larger online sample. Participants instructed by a charismatic vs. neutral leader worked significantly faster, indicating greater focus on the task. In both studies, leader charisma did not affect response accuracy, which was generally high in both leader conditions. Reacting faster in the charismatic condition did not come at the expense of less accurate responses. Our studies provide the first evidence for the effect of charismatic leaders on workers’ attentional focus.

Sophie Hudspith

Cross-gender interactions among colleagues are often filled with ambiguity, especially since the #MeToo movement. One factor contributing to confusion is the presence of behaviours that could equally be interpreted as friendly or sexual. There are individual differences in the level of sexual intent that is perceived from these behaviours, with research from dating contexts suggesting that men tend to be more likely to overperceive sexual intent. Sexual overperception has also been shown to lead to adverse outcomes, such as sexual harassment, making it important to understand this phenomenon within a work context. Due to the lack of a workplace measure, a series of studies were employed to develop a valid self-report measure of sexual intent perceptions among colleagues, using the act-frequency approach. In future research, we will adopt this scale to examine how and under which circumstances individuals are likely to perceive sexual interest in the behaviours of their colleagues, as well as what the implications are for doing so.

Building upon trait activation theory and the HEXACO model of personality, we investigated how HEXACO traits, particularly Honesty-Humility, manifest in (a) daily-life situations via a retrospective diary study, (b) emotional communications to others' (mis)fortunes via a vignette survey study, and (c) cheating behavior in an experimental mind game.

Ranran Li is a PhD student in the Organizational Psychology Department at the VU Amsterdam.

On the basis of gender, voters stereotype political candidates in terms of personality traits and areas of policy competencies. Women are perceived by voters as higher in communal traits (e.g., warmth) and lower in agentic traits (e.g. assertiveness) and as less competent to handle policy areas like national security, and the economy but more competent in areas like education and healthcare. The bulk of this work takes place in the U.S. context or a select few other Western countries. In this paper, we first provide a cross-cultural take on the existence and content of political gender stereotypes based on an original dataset spanning 20 democracies from all inhabited continents in the world. Second, we also utilize this dataset to address whether these stereotypes predict support for male and female political candidates and which stereotype constitutes the stronger predictor. Third, we test if trait and policy competence stereotypes exert stronger effects in countries with lower representation of women in politics. Results show that women uniformly have an advantage in communal traits (i.e., warmth and morality). When agency traits are broken into the sub-dimensions of competence and assertiveness, we find that men are generally advantaged on assertiveness traits, but women have an edge in competence-related traits. With respect to predictive power of support for women/men candidates, no stereotype emerges as the stronger predictor. Rather all stereotypes are substantially and significantly related to preferences for candidate gender. Finally, we find that stereotypes about traits (i.e., assertiveness and competence) and issues (national security) historically “owned” by men are significantly stronger predictors of gendered candidate preferences in countries with low representation of women in politics. This could suggest, that countering exactly these stereotypes is the most influential strategy for improving women’s political representation. Practical and theoretical implications of the results are discussed.

Dr Lasse Laustsen is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Aarhus in Denmark.

Cao Shen is a PhD student in the Organizational Psychology Department at VU Amsterdam.

Our aim was to investigate the social perception of employees who tend to work excessively. We considered that exhibiting busyness and working extra hours might be a tactic used by employees to display specific motivations and abilities. We assumed that such behavior is like how people display their resources through conspicuous consumption or how a peacock displays its tail. In a set of three vignette studies (total N = 383), we tested how the information about the level of work investments of three actors: standard = 38-40 hours per week as in contract vs. medium = 8-10 extra hours per week vs. high = 18-20 extra work hours per week influenced the perception of competence, warmth, morality,  and work ethic. Then, we examined the willingness to cooperate with the actors and how much they deserved to be paid per hour. In the Prolific samples from the United States, we controlled for socio-economic status and conscientiousness. Our findings reveal interesting patterns, for instance, a high-work-investment actor was perceived as more moral than a medium-work-investment actor, but the latter was evaluated as more competent. In our presentation, we want to present more findings, discuss our research plans, and initiate a discussion related to our research problem.

Dr. Jacek Buczny is an Assistant Professor in the Work and Organizational Psychology Department at the VU Amsterdam.

Although more valid predictions are made when information is combined algorithmically (mechanical prediction) than in the decision-maker’s mind (holistic prediction), decision makers rarely use algorithms in practice. One main reason is that decision-makers’ autonomy is restricted when algorithms are used to combine information. Unfortunately, affording decision makers greater autonomy in information combination decreases predictive validity compared to consistent algorithm use, creating an “autonomy-validity dilemma”. We hypothesized that two hybrid approaches to decision making - clinical and mechanical synthesis - should retain decision-makers’ autonomy while increasing predictive validity compared to pure holistic prediction. In clinical synthesis the decision maker can adjust an algorithms prediction, holistically. In mechanical synthesis the decision maker forms a holistic prediction that is weighted and subsequently combined with all other available information, algorithmically. In Study 1 (N = 261), mechanical and clinical synthesis resulted in higher predictive validity than holistic prediction, but user perceptions on these procedures were mixed. In Study 2 (N = 610), mechanical and clinical synthesis again resulted in much higher predictive validity than holistic prediction, and these procedures were perceived much more positively than the strict use of a prescribed algorithm. We recommend decision makers use mechanical synthesis for the most optimal balance of autonomy and predictive validity within decision making.

Jacob Matić is a PhD Candidate in the Work and Organizational Psychology Department at the VU Amsterdam.

On what basis do people select others as friends and collaborative partners? What causes one to prioritize collaboration with certain potential partners over others? If we could design ideal collaboration partners, what characteristics would we give them and why would those characteristics emerge as more important than others? These questions follow logically from the observation that people are selective in whom they associate with and do not equally accept all others as partners in collaborative ventures like friendships, coalitions, or alliances (collectively known as “partnerships”). Given that particular groups and relationships involve different tasks and require different behaviours from individuals, the personality traits associated with successful and mutually beneficial outcomes in a given task should be especially important when selecting partners for that task. In this study, which is part of the existing PACO dataset, previously-unacquainted participants were given a description of the cooperative task that they would have to perform in a series of dyads with other participants, and were asked to select partner(s) with whom they would like to perform this task. Half of participants performed a task that involved sharing monetary rewards and thus required traits such as trustworthiness, fairness, and sincerity in order to achieve a mutually beneficial outcome (trust-based task), while the remaining half performed a task that involved solving an intelligence test problem and thus required traits such as intelligence, competence, and skillfulness (competence-based task). Every participant then rated the perceived personality of each one of their interaction partners in a round-robin manner. We examined which personality traits are linked with partner selection in the two types of cooperative decision tasks, using effects derived from the Social Relations Model (SRM).

Vasiliki Kentrou is a PhD Candidate in the Work and Organizational Psychology Department at the VU Amsterdam.

In addition to the better known Replication Crisis, the behavioral sciences are suffering a Validity Crisis, in which many even replicable findings are accompanied by false conclusions. The Validity Crisis is easy to spot: the scientific literature is full of claims that directly contradict other claims. Adversarial collaborations, which call on disputants to codevelop tests of competing hypotheses, are an efficient method of improving our science’s capacity for self-correction and of promoting intellectual competition that exposes false claims. I’ll explain the benefits of adversarial collaborations for both science and scientists and advise on how to do them successfully.

Cory Clark is a Visiting Faculty Scholar in the Wharton School and the Executive Director of the Adversarial Collaboration Project at University of Pennsylvania, where she helps enemy scientists work together to resolve their ongoing empirical disputes. She received her PhD from University of California, Irvine in Social and Personality Psychology and Quantitative Methods in 2014. These days, she is interested in the politicization of science and other institutions, the cultural effects of the rise of women in institutions and leadership positions, and how human psychology can both facilitate and impede scientific progress.

The topic of gender differences in leadership behavior has received much attention from both researchers and practitioners. Despite this proliferation of studies and empirical progress, our understanding of gender differences for power sharing of leaders remains limited. Some studies suggest that female leaders are more likely to adopt participative leadership styles (i.e., share their power) while others show that women feel guilty about delegating, and therefore share their power less than male leaders do. The present research aims to shed light on the gendered dynamics of power-sharing behaviors by distinguishing between the dimensions delegation and consultation, and their alignment with agentic and communal traits. In doing so, we aim to explain the contradictory findings on gender differences in power sharing observed in previous literature.

Selection interviews are not only one of the most common selection tools but also one of the most valid ones – at least as long as they are properly designed and administered. However, there are concerns that applicants can improve their chances in an interview by means of faking and that this might also impair interview validity. In my presentation, I will provide an overview of a series of studies that we conducted during the last years and of answers from these studies to questions such as: Can applicants really present themselves more positively in an interview then they really are? How much can applicants fake if they really try hard? Are warnings a suitable means to reduce interview faking? How do warnings affect applicant reactions? Can better interview questions help to reduce faking? Do all applicants fake in interviews? When are applicants more likely to fake – and when are they more likely to use honest forms of impression management? And finally: Does faking really impair the criterion-related validity of selection interviews?

Klaus G. Melchers is professor and head of the Work and Organizational Psychology Group at Ulm University (Germany). His main research interests are in personnel selection and assessment and include assessment centers, selection interviews, different forms of self-presentation in selection settings, and game-based assessment. Further interests concerning topics such as personality assessment in the work context, rater training, response behavior in surveys, and effective poster design. His research has appeared in journals such as Journal of Applied Psychology, Personnel Psychology, Journal of Business and Psychology, International Journal of Selection and Assessment, Human Performance, European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, Psychological Review, and Applied Psychology: An International Review.

Traditionally, the leadership domain has heavily utilized survey methodologies in measurement, predicated on the assumption that follower evaluations effectively capture leader behaviors. However, this approach has been increasingly criticized due to concerns over its reliability and the potential for bias introduced by the reliance on Implicit Leadership Theories (ILTs), which may reflect perceptions based on raters’ preconceived notions rather than actual leader behaviors. By integrating cognitive science perspectives, particularly the differentiation between episodic and semantic memory, this research aims to enhance the precision of leadership measurement. It explores the impact of source monitoring training, retention interval, and response latency on the utilization of episodic memory in leadership evaluations. Employing multiple 2x2 between-subjects factorial experimental designs, the study represents a pioneering effort to examine how these factors interact to produce more accurate and unbiased leadership evaluation using episodic memory. By addressing a significant gap in existing literature, the study aims to offer substantial implications for leadership measurement techniques, thereby contributing to the advancement of leadership theory and practice.

Mert Unur is a professional with a diverse background in academia and human resources management, with a research focus on organizational behavior, particularly in leadership dynamics, job security, and work engagement. His previous professional journey spans significant roles, including Human Resources Generalist and IT Recruitment Consultant, handling performance management, talent acquisition, and leadership dynamics. Currently, he is serving as a PhD Research Fellow at the University of Stavanger, Norway. In his research project, he is delving into the field of responsible leadership, seeking to disentangle its complex nature and explore methods for producing more accurate and unbiased leadership measurements.

Imagine hiring a senior manager, admitting students to a study program, making medical diagnoses, or deciding to release a prisoner on parole. In these situations, decision makers use multiple pieces of information (e.g., behavioral observations, test scores) to reach a decision. Most often, decision makers integrate information using their judgment. Yet, decades of research have produced the robust finding that more accurate decisions are made when information is integrated using simple algorithms. Unfortunately, decision makers rarely use algorithms in practice. Many people still strongly believe in the value of expert judgment. How can we increase algorithm use in practice and hence improve decision accuracy without losing the acceptance of key stakeholders? Do experts make more accurate decisions than novices? In this talk, I will discuss how decision making can be improved in practice and introduce the lens model as an overarching framework for studying (interventions to improve) decision making. Furthermore, I will present some preliminary data from an ongoing project and discuss future research ideas.

Marvin Neumann is an assistant professor in the Organizational Psychology section at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research focuses on improving test use and decision making in selection, algorithm aversion, and the scientist-practitioner gap.

Charismatic leaders move masses, inspire millions, and do not shy away from guiding and leading in times of crisis and change. Research on charismatic leaders mainly centers around their effectiveness in organizational settings. Indeed, substantial evidence on the economic value of charismatic leadership has been accumulated during the last decade. What has remained largely unexplored are the cognitive mechanisms that underlie the effectiveness of charismatic leaders. During my PhD project, we explored this question using various methods (e.g., eye-tracking, cognitive tasks, EEG). Our findings illustrate how charismatic leaders are capable of altering people’s attentional processes. In a postdoc research project, we build on this work and explore whether charismatic leaders narrow workers’ attention to specific information. The proposed mechanism could explain why charismatic leaders are so effective in increasing performance at group and individual levels. During the talk, I briefly summarize the findings from my PhD project and lay out the research plans for the postdoc project.

Lara Engelbert

Job interviews are one of the most valid and best accepted instruments of personnel selection. Almost every organization uses job interviews – often as the only selection tool at all. Not least due to the Covid-19 pandemic, technology-mediated job interviews have experienced an enormous upswing. Where telephone interviews, videoconference interviews or asynchronous video interviews were previously often only used to pre-select applicants or if a journey would otherwise have been too far, interviews via videoconference were suddenly the only way to introduce yourself "in person". The main advantages of technology-mediated interviews are flexibility and cost savings for the selection process. Asynchronous video interviews also offer the advantage of independence from time zones, which also opens up a larger pool of applicants. An additional point that should not be overlooked is that asynchronous video interviews are highly standardized and structured in their execution. However, these advantages are also offset by a number of disadvantages, such as the necessary availability of hardware and software. There are also many unanswered questions regarding technology-mediated interviews:

- How widespread are these interviews actually, and how are they used?

- Are technology-mediated interviews equally accepted as face-to-face interviews?

- How can their acceptance be improved?

- Are there differences in interview performance ratings between different kinds of interviews? Is this due to the applicants or the interviewers?

- By which design features is performance in asynchronous interviews influenced?

- Are there any differences in the criterion related validity between different kinds of interviews?

The aim of this talk is to provide an in-depth insight into the current state of research on technology-mediated interviews and to answer the above questions.

Prof. Dr. Johannes Basch is an IO-psychologist with a focus on digital instruments in personnel selection processes. He teaches and researches at the University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm (Germany). Furthermore, he works as trainer for communication and public speaking and as a consultant in management diagnostics.

Addressing environmental challenges requires effective leadership to mobilize individuals, and coordinate collective efforts. However, what qualities do individuals seek in an environmental leader? Based on the evolutionary psychology of leadership and followership, we posit that certain characteristics of contemporary environmental issues bear similarities to recurring challenges encountered by early hominids, thus triggering the same fundamental follower needs. Specifically, we argue that dominant and authoritarian leaders might be appealing to followers particularly when they seek active protection in an immediate crisis. We tested this idea in an experiment that presented participants (n = 500) with three scenarios describing an event happening in the city where they live; a financial crisis, an environmental crisis, and a control condition. Participants were asked to imagine they were a member of the state council which was tasked to select the company that would be hired to handle the aftermath of the event. After this, participants were presented with 10 pairs of photos (randomly ordered and matched in attractiveness and age) depicting ostensible CEOs of the companies that applied for the job. Each pair depicted one male and one female CEOs. For each pair, participants were asked to indicate which company they would vote for; the male-led company or the female-led company (implicit leader preferences), and rate which leadership-related traits they would like to see in that leader (explicit leader preferences). Overall, linear mixed models controlling for the specific pairings between male and female CEOs, showed that male CEOs (over female ones) were preferred when participants were presented with an event involving a crisis (vs. the control condition) and this was particularly true for the financial crisis condition. Further, the crisis conditions also led participants to rate prototypically masculine traits as more desirable than prototypically feminine ones. Importantly, simple effects showed that this effect derived from participants in both crisis conditions rating prototypically feminine traits (vs. prototypically masculine traits) less favorably than in the control condition. We discuss these results in relation to the literature on evolutionary-derived leadership preferences, as well as in terms of what they might mean for environmental leadership.

Dr. Gonzalo Palomo-Vélez is an Assistant Professor of Social and Evolutionary Psychology at the Institute of Social Sciences (ICSO) at O'Higgins University in Chile. His research in environmental and applied social psychology focuses on studying the functional and social motives that underlie people's environmental actions. Before his current position, Dr. Palomo-Vélez worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, where he explored the dynamics of individual and institutional factors influencing the public acceptability of energy production. In 2020, he earned his Ph.D. in evolutionary and social psychology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Mark van Vugt and Prof. Dr. Joshua Tybur.

In this colloquium I would like to exchange ideas about leadership and leadership development in practice. The past 20 years I have been working with leadership in organizations in many different roles. First in diagnosing and selecting leaders and now in leadership development, training, and coaching. In this work I see recurring patterns of high expectations and ambitious goals, where the emphasis is often on achieving strategic objectives (demands) and less on shaping a future perspective (desire). More than once, this leads to disappointment for the organization that initiated it and the consultants who have done their best to of good service. In this talk I would like to share the way in which we shape leadership development and the experiences and dilemmas we encounter in the process. In addition, I would like to exchange ideas with the attendees about where we see starting points for strengthening future leadership and how scientific research and findings can play a role in this.

Jozef Zondag is a registered psychologist NIP/Work and Organization. Hij works as a Senior Managing Consultant at Berenschot and is the chairman of the NFMD (Dutch Foundation for Management Development). He is specialized in leadership development, coaching and the realization of complex organizational change processes. As a consultant, trainer and coach, he loves to work with the (often unconscious) dynamics of work the place. He has a strong desire to encourage people to authorize themselves to be the leader of their own development and to live their work live to its full potential.

Who do we like and dislike? Research by Dunlop et al. (2023) suggests that we like those who are agreeable, honest, conscientious, and similar to us. I will be presenting research conducted by Patrick Dunlop, Reinout de Vries, and myself, which delves deeper into this question by exploring the differences between the colleagues and acquaintances who we like and those we dislike.

Felix Kerscher is a Pre-PhD student at the Work and Organizational Psychology Department at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He assists in research projects using the HEXACO personality model and algorithmic decision-making.

Prof. dr. Annet de Lange (1977; cum laude PHD 2005) works as Professor Sustainable employability on the labour market at the Open University, Faculty of Psychology, Heerlen, the Netherlands, and as Research Consultant at Berenschot in Utrecht. Furthermore, she is Visiting Professor at the faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Stavanger in Norway, and the NTNU, faculty of psychology, Trondheim, Norway and faculty of psychology University of Coruna, Spain. More information about her scientific work and books can be found through this website.

To increase the influence of women in the top of their organizations, many countries, including the Netherlands, have introduced gender quota. However, the impact of shifting gender ratios (the number of women versus men) on women's relative influence in decision-making bodies remains unclear. In my PhD project, I tackle this question from a new perspective, examining how individuals dynamically amass influence through the reciprocal acts of claiming and granting leadership. During my talk I will discuss claiming-granting interactions in the workplace, their variations based on team gender ratios, and their potential impact on leadership, influence, and advancement within organizations.

Sterre van Niekerken is a PhD student at the organizational section. Her research focuses on leadership, group/team interactions, behavioral coding and gender ratios.