Compassion Counts

For decades, research has defined prototypical leaders as bold and dominant, but surprisingly few researchers have asked followers what they want from those in power. 

A new paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and co-authored by Assistant Professor Erica Bailey and Rebecca Ponce de Leon of Columbia Business School offers some of the first large-scale evidence that followers consistently favor leaders with traits like fairness, compassion, and open-mindedness over those who are merely assertive or ambitious. 

Researchers found that MBA students were more than twice as likely to use communal words like honest, fair, and caring to describe their ideal leader. In a follow-up study, online participants chose those leadership traits 66% of the time. 

The results show that employees don’t want just capable leaders; they want leaders who care. Given that psychological safety has been linked to high performance, Bailey recommends that managers identify and encourage employees with strong communal traits to seek leadership roles, involve workers in leader selection, and normalize vulnerability at the top.

“People want to relate to each other, not to someone pretending to be flawless and all-knowing,” Bailey says. “As a manager, remember that followers often value morality, perspective-taking, and empathy over traditional displays of authority.”