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This article reviews the empirical literature on personality, leadership, and organizational effectiveness to make 3 major points. First, leadership is a real and vastly consequential phenomenon, perhaps the single most important issue in the human sciences. Second, leadership is about the performance of teams, groups, and organizations. Good leadership promotes effective team and group performance, which in turn enhances the well-being of the incumbents; bad leadership degrades the quality of life for everyone associated with it. Third, personality predicts leadership—who we are is how we lead—and this information can be used to select future leaders or improve the performance of current incumbents.

This article analyzes the topic of leadership from an evolutionary perspective and proposes three conclusions that are not part of mainstream theory. First, leading and following are strategies that evolved for solving social coordination problems in ancestral environments, including in particular the problems of group movement, intragroup peacekeeping, and intergroup competition. Second, the relationship between leaders and followers is inherently ambivalent because of the potential for exploitation of followers by leaders. Third, modern organizational structures are sometimes inconsistent with aspects of our evolved leadership psychology, which might explain the alienation and frustration of many citizens and employees. The authors draw several implications of this evolutionary analysis for leadership theory, research, and practice.

This article concerns the real-world importance of leadership for the success or failure of organizations and social institutions. The authors propose conceptualizing leadership and evaluating leaders in terms of the performance of the team or organization for which they are responsible. The authors next offer a taxonomy of the dependent variables used as criteria in leadership studies. A review of research using this taxonomy suggests that the vast empirical literature on leadership may tell us more about the success of individual managerial careers than the success of these people in leading groups, teams, and organizations. The authors then summarize the evidence showing that leaders do indeed affect the performance of organizations--for better or for worse--and conclude by describing the mechanisms through which they do so.

The fundamental assumption underlying the use of 360-degree assessments is that ratings from different sources provide unique and meaningful information about the target manager’s performance. Extant research appears to support this assumption by demonstrating low correlations between rating sources. This article reexamines the support of this assumption, suggesting that past research has been distorted by a statistical artifact—restriction of variance in job performance. This artifact reduces the amount of between-target variance in ratings and attenuates traditional correlation-based estimates of rating similarity. Results obtained from a Monte Carlo simulation and two field studies support this restriction of variance hypothesis. Noncorrelation-based methods of assessing interrater agreement indicated that agreement between sources was about as high as agreement within sources. Thus, different sources did not appear to be furnishing substantially unique information. The authors conclude by questioning common practices in 360-degree assessments and offering suggestions for future research and application.

Employability is defined as the capacity to gain and retain formal employment, or find new employment if necessary. Reasons for unemployment are often attributed to economic factors, but psychological factors associated with employability also contribute to the problem. Consequently, industrial-organizational psychologists should be uniquely suited to contribute to policy solutions for enhancing employability. This review begins by surveying the most common research approach to employability-the study of career success-which psychologists believe is determined by cognitive abilities, personality, and educational achievement. Next, we review the literature concerning what employers actually want. This section highlights the importance of social skills (being rewarding to deal with) as a key determinant of employability. We conclude by proposing a model for understanding the psychological determinants of employability and for bridging the gap between what psychologists prescribe and what employers want.

The vast body of research on management and leadership that has accumulated over the past 100 years leads to two very different conclusions. On the one hand, many people believe that the effort has largely been wasted. For example, Hamel (2007) argued that the modern study of management is stagnant and out of date, and Khurana (2007) argued that attempts to create a science of management have failed. In an effort to provide guidance to practitioners, Kramer (2008, p. 26) reviewed the leadership literature, commented that it is "a strange mixture of alchemy, romantic idealism, and reason," and concluded that the lack of consistent, actionable findings prompts some business people "to wash their hands of the whole subject, talent shortage or no talent shortage." (See also Vol. 1, chap. 7, this handbook.) Other reviewers believe that there are recognized principles of management that can be used to enhance organizational performance (cf. Fayol, 1949). For instance, Bloom and Van Reenen (2007) studied the performance of 732 manufacturing firms in the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany and found that a firm's financial performance was a function of the degree to which it followed "well-established management practices" in the areas of operations, performance management, and talent management. The more profitable companies enhanced operations through continuous improvement, setting clear performance goals, monitoring and reviewing performance, and aligning incentives with performance. Bloom and Van Reenen replicated these findings using an additional 3,268 firms, including a large sample from Asia. Four of their conclusions are worth noting. First, there are, in fact, some well-established princi-ples of management. Second, the companies that use these principles are more profitable than those who do not. Third, senior leadership decides whether to use effective management practices. And finally, the best run companies are multinationals; the worst run companies are government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and companies managed by second-generation family members.The economic literature clearly shows that good management enhances organizational performance and that some managers are better than others. However, Kramer (2008) and other critics are also right-there is little consensus in the psychological literature regarding the characteristics of good managers (cf. Hogan, 2007, pp. 106-109). In contrast, the research on bad managers converges rather well. Across studies with different methodologies and in different organizations and national cultures, and across organizational level, the data have shown that failed managers have bad judgment, can not build teams, have troubled relationships, and can not manage themselves or learn from their mistakes. This research is important for both economic and moral reasons. THE COST OF BAD MANAGERSWhen managers fail, it costs time and resources to replace them. Lombardo reported that, in 1985, two Fortune 500 organizations asked him for advice on preventing...

In this study, dark‐side traits are conceptualised as extreme extensions of the “bright‐side” traits of the Five‐Factor Model that often have counterproductive effects. We predict which dark‐side traits will be related to ratings of “too little” and “too much” of four leader behaviors and how low levels of Emotional Stability may accentuate the relationship between dark‐side traits and excessive leader behavior. Analyses in a sample of 320 American and European managers and executives rated by 4,906 co‐workers provided support for most predicted relationships, with medium‐sized overall multivariate effects. Support for a moderating effect for Emotional Stability was also found. Scores near the normative mean on the dark‐side traits were associated with optimal levels of the leader behaviors, whereas both high scores and, unexpectedly, low scores were associated with extreme, ineffective leader behaviors. Implications are considered for future research on the role of the dark side in leadership, re‐conceptualising the interpretation of low scores on dark‐side personality scales, and the coaching and development of managers.