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For some time, it has been argued that stories articulated by leaders are an important vehicle for exercising influence, but stories of leadership might also serve as a means for developing leadership potential. One critical activity involved in leadership is vision formation, which involves constructing and communicating a future state that guides followers in “making sense” of complex organizational events. Like leader visions, analyzing stories also, by nature, evokes sensemaking processes. As a result, analyzing stories of leadership may provide a natural means for practicing the art of sensemaking. In the present investigation, undergraduates were asked to read six short stories about incidents of either pragmatic or charismatic leadership in business settings. After reading each story, questions were asked to encourage sensemaking of story events, causes, and emotions. Participants were subsequently asked to formulate visions for leading a secondary school –– a transfer task. It was found that stronger visions were produced when participants were asked to analyze both story events and the causes of these events. The implications of these findings for the use of leadership stories in leader development initiatives are discussed.

Given human aggression and warfare are often described as the most pressing behavioral problems of our time, we focus on a related phenomenon, with large-scale social, political, and economic consequences: assassination of political leaders. We explore the role of social conflict as a predictor of political assassination and use historiometric methods and an extensive archival dataset to identify and code for contextual factors associated with social conflict and political homicide. Our results indicate an increase in social conflict increases the likelihood of assassination; moreover, environmental constraints and traditional culture predict leader assassination through social conflict. We discuss implications of these findings and suggest future research on contextual factors, assassination of political leaders, and their collective-level impact.

Stories about notable, 20th-century politicians were investigated as a means by which reading stories of leadership influences subsequent ethical decision-making performance. Undergraduates read four short stories in which charismatic politicians exhibited a personalized, socialized, or neutral power orientation, followed by responding to four ethical dilemmas in the marketing domain—a distant transfer task. Results indicated that reading stories featuring personalized protagonists inhibited subsequent ethical decision-making processes. However, intensity of narrative processing, personal identification with the protagonist, and presence or absence of an ethical salience probe moderated these effects. Implications are discussed regarding the use of stories as a tool for ethical development and the importance of managing stories of leadership circulated throughout organizations and society.

Over the years, a growing body of evidence indicates that certain cognitive skills are a critical determinant of leader performance. In the present effort we show that application of these skills is typically founded in case-based knowledge. Subsequently, we identify nine key skills people in leadership positions employ when working with case-based knowledge to address leadership problems: 1) problem definition, 2) cause/goal analysis, 3) constraint analysis, 4) planning, 5) forecasting, 6) creative thinking, 7) idea evaluation, 8) wisdom, and 9) sensemaking/visioning. Individual and situational contingencies shaping effective application of these thinking skills is discussed. In addition, the implications of findings bearing on leader thinking skills for leader assessment and leader development are considered.

A common management task in organizations is decision making, and some of the most important decisions made by business leaders are those that involve an ethical component. This study utilizes historiometric methods to explore the ethical decision making processes of business leaders in order to improve outcomes. We identify a series of cognitive biases and metacognitive strategies and explore their effects on leader ethical decision making using a sensemaking model. The impact of biases and strategies at each stage of the sensemaking model is used to identify ways business leaders can improve ethical decision making. Implications for using the sensemaking model in ethical decision making are discussed.

The large, positive correlation between speaking time and leader emergence is well-established. As such, some authors have argued for a “babble hypothesis” of leadership, suggesting that only the quantity of speaking, not its quality, determines leader emergence. However, previous tests of this notion may have been problematic. Some studies have asserted a causal effect of speaking time on leader emergence based on experimental studies, but have limited participant communication, access to reliable information, or both. Other studies have used more ecologically valid designs, but have not always controlled for relevant participant traits or roles, suggesting potential endogeneity effects. Testing the babble hypothesis thus requires a study that is both ecologically valid and supports strong inference. The current study fills that gap and finds that speaking time retains its direct effect on leader emergence when accounting for intelligence, personality, gender, and the endogeneity of speaking time.

Traditionally, it has been assumed that leaders, like other people, are typically poor at forecasting. In the present effort, we argue that people can sometimes prove effective at forecasting and that effective forecasting is particularly important to performance in leadership roles. Subsequently, evidence bearing on how four key variables, mental models, objectivity, time frame, and case content, influence the effectiveness of leader forecasting is examined along with interventions that might contribute to effective forecasting on the part of leaders. The implications of these observations for understanding leader cognition are discussed.

Models describing how leaders think point to a complex set of cognitive processes. To execute these processes it may be necessary for leaders to simplify the problem at hand with respect to critical contingencies. In the present effort, undergraduates were asked to work on a vision formation task with the resulting vision statements being appraised for quality, originality, elegance, perceived utility, and affective reaction. Manipulations were made to encourage application of more or less complex mental models, a larger, or smaller, number of relevant concepts and cases, and forecasting of positive or negative outcomes. It was found that the strongest visions were produced when people used relatively simple mental models, few schema and cases, and they focused on forecasting negative outcomes. Thus leader performance appears to reflect simplification and an attempt to minimize negative outcomes. The implications of these observations for understanding leader cognition and leader performance are discussed.

Although few scholars would dispute the point leaders must think, cognition has not, perhaps, received the attention it warrants in studies of leadership. The intent of the present special issue is to examine how cognition influences leader emergence and performance. In this introductory piece we argue that cognitive skills, often domain specific cognitive skills, strongly influence leader emergence and performance. The conditions that moderate the impact of these skills are also examined along with the ways in which cognitive capacities shape subsequent leader behavior. The implications of cognition for leader development and directions for future research are discussed.