What do workers really want in a leader? New study challenges stereotypes

Early in her class, Leading People, UC Berkeley Haas professor Erica Bailey asks her first-year MBA students to describe the type of leader they want to be. What she often hears in response are qualities like being empathetic, trustworthy, and inspiring.

This “ideal” leader stands in sharp contrast to many of the “typical” business leaders held up in popular culture—think Logan Roy from Succession—or in real life, such as Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Jeffrey Bezos.

“Typical leaders often call to mind figures who are powerful or assertive, but not necessarily the most moral or inclusive,” says Bailey, an assistant professor of management who studies identity, the self, and authenticity.

This gap in perception of leadership qualities isn’t just anecdotal. For decades, research has focused on prototypical leaders as bold and dominant, suggesting that leaders emerge—and are selected—based exclusively on their ability to demonstrate these traits. Yet surprisingly few researchers have asked those who would work under these leaders what traits they want in their bosses.

A new study by Bailey, co-authored by Rebecca Ponce de Leon of Columbia Business School, suggests that followers strongly prefer leaders with more communal traits— such as vulnerability, caring, and morality—even when it comes at the expense of traditional leadership qualities like assertiveness and competitive drive.

Their paper, The Preeminence of Communality in the Leadership Preferences of Followers, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, offers some of the first large-scale evidence that followers consistently favor leaders who are fair, compassionate, and open-minded over those who are merely assertive or ambitious.

Why we haven’t been asking the right leadership questions

Psychologist David Bakan first defined human traits as largely being grouped into two fundamental orientations: agency—self-focused traits like independence, mastery, ambition—or communality—other-focused traits like social connection, fairness, and warmth. Social psychologists have consistently found that people are more attuned to communal traits when judging others, but leadership research has long emphasized agency as the key to who becomes a leader and how they get chosen.

Bailey and Ponce de Leon argue that research on leadership has failed to consider the crucial role of followers in these theories. They cite three possible reasons for this:

• First, most studies have documented the traits of a typical leader rather than asking people what they wish for in leaders.
• Second, studies rarely ask participants to imagine themselves as followers, capturing general impressions rather than personal preferences.
• And finally, since agentic traits as seen as stereotypically male and communal traits are seen as stereotypically female, much of the research in this space has focused on gender biases in leadership perceptions rather than preferences for specific traits.

Followers have an overwhelming preference for communality

Across eight preregistered studies with more than 3,600 participants—including MBA students and online workers—Bailey and Ponce de Leon found a clear pattern:

• Ideal vs typical leaders: MBA students were more than twice as likely to use communal words like honest, fair, and caring to describe their ideal leader than a typical leader.
• Comparing leadership traits: In a follow up study, about 400 online participants were asked to choose between a communal or agentic trait to describe their ideal leader. They chose communal traits 66% of the time. While some agentic traits were highly sought after, Bailey noted that, “there were 30 communal traits that are more popular than the most popular agentic trait.”
• Most important leadership traits: When asked to choose their top 10 most important leadership characteristics from lists of 25 agentic and 25 communal traits, participants on average selected six communal and just four agentic traits.
• Real-world scenarios: In a simulated hiring exercise based on performance reviews, participants favored managers who were high in both communality and agency. And, managers high in communality and low in agency still performed well. Meanwhile, those high in agency but low in communality fared poorly. “We were surprised that we didn’t even find a strong preference for high vs. low agency. Instead, it seemed that followers preferred agentic traits only when the manager was also highly communal.”
• Communal leaders are less likely to raise hands: In a final study, the researchers found people who scored higher on communal traits were less likely to put themselves forward as potential leaders on a group task.

Flipping the script on leadership

Bailey says the preference for communal leaders reflects the relational nature of leadership. In fact, social psychology has shown that people on the whole care less about how effective another person is than they do about how that other person will treat them. “You’re giving power to this leader over you, and so you’d rather have someone who is understanding, moral and trustworthy, versus someone who is super-efficient and smart, but may treat you poorly,” she says.

She speculates that another part of the reason for this effect is that most people feel like they know how to do their jobs and don’t want to be micromanaged. In fact, the preference for communal leaders in the study was even stronger among Gen Xers and Boomers, who are further along in their careers. “They’ve reached a level of competence to get where they’re saying: ‘I need a leader who supports me in becoming the best and most successful version of myself, rather than tells me exactly how to do my job,” she says.

Why the disconnect persists

If workers want communal leaders, why do organizations keep hiring those who are more self-oriented? Bailey speculates this may be due, in part, to simple inertia. “There’s a very strong prototype we have of what a leader is, so when it comes time to replace a leader, there is a strong pattern-matching that occurs,” Bailey says.

Sexism may also play a role. Since communal qualities are strongly associated with women, they may be undervalued by association. Women are then confronted with a double standard:  When they adopt agentic traits, they face backlash—which may be even stronger as they are “violating what people wanted all along, which are these communal traits,” says Bailey.

Lastly, she says, communal leaders are less likely to put themselves up for positions of leadership. “People think, I don’t have the real skills to be a leader—even though what they don’t realize is that they might possess the qualities that followers really do want.”

How to close the gap

The results show that employees don’t just want capable leaders, they want leaders who are relational. 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.
• Incorporate the voice of workers in leader selection.
• Track and assess “soft skills” for managers.

The takeaway

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

Read the full paper:

The Preeminence of Communality in the Leadership Preferences of Followers

By Rebecca Ponce de Leon and Erica R. Bailey

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2025