Leadership

With the Test Solution “Leadership”, the psychological prerequisites of a person for successful leadership behavior can be assessed. Leadership effectiveness is defined in common meta-analyses as a summary measure of fulfilling the leadership role, for example through objective performance and productivity measures, goal achievement, as well as satisfaction and evaluation by employees or supervisors. Integrative leadership models therefore assume that cognitive ability and personality together with leadership motivation represent those distal and proximal influencing factors that substantially determine the development and execution of competent leadership behavior (cf. DeRue et al., 2011; Badura et al., 2020).

General cognitive ability (g) facilitates successful leadership performance because it contributes substantially to solving complex problems, analyzing dynamic situations, and selecting appropriate action strategies. Leadership research has long provided clear evidence that cognitive abilities belong to the distal predictors of effective leadership. A comprehensive meta-analysis by Judge et al. (2004) with k = 151 samples and a total of N = 40,652 persons documents a corrected[1] relationship of ρ = ,21 between general cognitive ability and leadership effectiveness. A separate analysis by Badura et al. (2020) confirms smaller but stable relationships for the same ability of ρ = ,15 (k = 38), highlighting the role of cognitive abilities as a robust, although not the most important, influencing factor. The relative weighting of specific cognitive abilities in this Test Solution was determined on the basis of their respective loading on g (SCHUHFRIED, 2025b).

In addition to cognitive abilities, personality traits prove to be central distal influencing factors in the leadership process. A large-scale meta-analysis by Badura et al. (2020), which includes k = 63 samples with several thousand persons per variable, showed that in particular the Big Five dimensions Extraversion (ρ = ,31) and Conscientiousness (ρ = ,28) demonstrate substantial relationships with leadership effectiveness and leadership behavior. Openness (ρ = ,24) and Emotional stability (ρ = ,24) show similarly strong relationships, while Agreeableness shows a very small negative relationship of ρ = -,08. These findings are consistent with earlier meta-analyses that found very similar effect sizes for the prediction of leadership effectiveness (cf. DeRue et al., 2011). Overall, it becomes clear that the combination of cognitive abilities and the Big Five personality dimensions has substantial predictive power for leadership success - for example, the meta-analytic correlation matrix by Badura et al. (2020) shows an explained variance of R² = ,24 for cognitive abilities and personality with regard to leadership effectiveness, while leadership motivation plays a subordinate role after controlling for personality[2] - this empirically underlines the relevance of these distal predictors. Distal predictors also have the advantage over proximal predictors such as interests and motivation that they show greater temporal stability and therefore enable long-term prediction of leadership potential.

The Test Solution “Leadership” assesses the following dimensions:

• Cognitive Ability: Logical reasoning, numerical ability, and verbal ability (INT)

• Personality: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Emotional stability (FCB5)

The table below provides a complete overview of the specific weightings of the individual tests used to calculate the overall score for the Test Solution “Leadership”. The weighting is based on the correlation matrix according to Badura et al. (2020), on which a Relative Importance Analysis (RIA) was recalculated (R package relaimpo: Grömping, 2006; linear RIA: Lindeman et al., 1980, p. 119ff), which is preferable to the use of meta-analytic regression weights (cf. Darr & Catano, 2016). Further information on the calculation and interpretation of the result of a testing can be found on the page: Notes on evaluation and interpretation.

The Test Solution Leadership therefore enables a time-efficient, well-founded, and scientifically grounded assessment of a person’s potential to develop and implement competent and effective leadership behavior in practice. For additional assessment of leadership motivation, the MAP (Management potential analysis) is available to you via the Marketplace. Please note that when configuring the test sequence and adding tests that are not part of the SCHUHFRIED Selection, the combined results overview is no longer automatically available (see Notes on evaluation and interpretation). The test duration is approximately 31 minutes.

References can be found here: Literature

[1] All reported effect sizes for the Test Solution Leadership are corrected for the reliability of the criterion and the predictor and are therefore denoted with ρ (cf. Schmidt & Hunter, 1998).

[2] Calculated based on: [formula image], with rxy: vector of the correlations between predictors X and criterion Y, Rxx: correlation matrix of the predictors among each other (derived from equation 3.5.2 and A1.1 in Cohen et al., 2003).