What if Training Is More Important than Talent?
ARE LEADERS BORN OR DEVELOPED? A STUDY BY MARIANI AND GAGLIARDI OFFERS AN EXPLANATIONLeadership skills do not relate entirely on a natural talent. They can be learned. Myriam Mariani and Luisa Gagliardi, both professors at Bocconi, used an original method to assess it: they analyzed data on military service. “When it comes to leadership skills, there is a self-selection effect. People with a knack for it tend to enroll in programs that teach leadership. This makes very difficult to understand how much leadership depends on a natural talent and how much on training”, professor Mariani says.
The authors used data on military service in order to isolate the effect of training. “Literature says that during military service people are directly exposed to examples of hierarchical leadership. There is also an indirect effect: the draft led people to keep studying in order to postpone their service or to have access to better assignments”.
The authors employed a difference-in-difference research design using the policy discontinuity in the US, which abandoned the compulsory draft in 1972, and a sample from countries that kept compulsory draft in the same timespan. Because it is compulsory, military service cancels out the effects of self-selection. Then, data from 7,000 research and development projects, for which there has been a great demand for leadership in the last 20 years, was analyzed.
Read more about this topic:
Massimo Magni. The Sense of Purpose of Leaders 4.0
Are Narcissists Good for Their Acolytes?
The Authenticity of the One Guiding the Team
When Style Reduces the Discount
The Boss’s Emotions
Women in Politics. Ask the System
The Independence of Those Who Control
Women in Parliament Save Lives. Scores of Them
by Claudio Todesco
