Virtues of introversion and intuition for leaders

Some of the most significant and successful leaders in history were known for their intuition: Abraham Lincoln, Oprah Winfrey and Albert Einstein, to name a few.

But not all leaders can listen to their gut in every situation. A new study involving Dustin Sleesman, associate professor of management at the University of Delaware’s Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics, examined the concept of intuition and when it is helpful for leaders managing large teams.

Sleesman and his co-authors found that teams performed better when their leaders were armed with a large amount of information. Without a large amount of information, intuition did not lead to a performance advantage.

In Leader Intuition: Good or Bad for Multiteam System Performance? The Roles of Information Load and Introversion, published in the August issue of Group and organizational managementSleesman and his co-authors from Michigan State University studied more than 3,000 U.S. Air Force captains at a military base in Alabama. As part of their leadership training, the captains participated in a team-based battlefield simulation that gave researchers the opportunity to observe and analyze their behavior.

Their study focused on a trait called intuitive cognitive style, the tendency to use intuition when thinking and making decisions. By measuring this trait in the captains, the researchers reached the following conclusions:

• Intuition thrives on information. When leaders have a lot of information to process, intuition can be a valuable cognitive tool that helps them integrate and understand it – and then use that knowledge to coordinate the team.

• If there is not enough information to process, intuition is not the right choice in the situation.
• According to Sleesman, “Intuition led to an even greater increase in team performance when leaders were introverted because it gave them an inward, reflective, and observational focus. As a result, they seemed to benefit even more from their intuition.”

Sleesman shares insights into the inspiration for his work and provides insights into the lessons his research brings to business professionals.

What inspires your research?

I have always been fascinated by how people think and make decisions, whether it is about important life or career issues or simply the everyday things we deal with. I am particularly interested in how people are influenced by factors outside of their conscious awareness: those “invisible” forces that are all around us.

Your article is about when team leaders should rely on intuition when making decisions. Why is this important?

In modern management and leadership training, intuition has become a “dirty word” because we know it can lead us to make biased decisions. For example, relying on our intuition can make us too attached to our past experiences and assumptions. Therefore, managers and leaders are often taught to put their intuition aside in favor of careful and rational (and slow) analysis by collecting data and using tools such as statistical modeling and formal decision-making methods.

At the same time, however, the power of the human brain cannot be denied! More and more research shows that intuition can actually be very helpful in some situations. The key question is: what kind of situations are these? We already know that intuition can be useful in situations where we have specialist knowledge and the decision to be made is subjective, such as in creativity-based tasks.

Our research provided new insights by showing that the amount of information that leaders have to process in their job role could also be relevant. We also recognized that today’s working world is more collaborative and team-based than ever before, so we were particularly interested in leaders who oversee complex systems with multiple teams.

They also examine the differences between introverted and extroverted leaders. Is one better than the other?

In both research and practice, extraversion is overwhelmingly seen as a beneficial trait for leaders. Most people associate effective leadership with activity, assertiveness, energy, and talkativeness—all aspects of extraversion. But many extraverted people are not very good at “turning off” some of these things. They sometimes talk too much, are too assertive, and so on.

In contrast, introverts tend to be more thoughtful, and they are more likely to observe and listen to others. They take time to work out an idea or solution before acting. Their penchant for gathering information (which is plentiful in high-information-overload situations) makes this personality trait a great complement to intuition.

A small but growing number of researchers have examined the benefits of these aspects to highlight that, contrary to popular belief, introversion can actually be an advantage for leaders. History provides us with many examples of people who were introverted yet highly successful leaders: Bill Gates, Abraham Lincoln, and Mahatma Gandhi, to name a few.

What surprised you about the research results?

In this research, we also measured the analytical cognitive style of leaders, and it did not have strong effects on performance. It was not the focus of our study, so we had to remove it from our article during the journal review process. Most people assume that intuition and analysis are opposite ends of a spectrum (like introversion/extraversion), but they are actually independent dimensions that are not strongly related. In other words, if someone does not have a strong intuitive style, it does not mean that they have a strong analytical style. Still, I expected an analytical cognitive style to increase performance to some extent, but an intuitive cognitive style seemed to be much more impactful.

What can we expect next based on this work?

In today’s workplace, leaders must process ever-increasing amounts of information to be successful in their jobs. From a psychological perspective, this is very demanding. Some research has identified solutions to this problem, including efforts to simplify information, use better technology and software (such as artificial intelligence), restructure organizations and teams, and so on.

However, our research shows for the first time that intuition is a possible solution. The next step is to figure out what leaders can do to harness their intuition while still putting aside the biases that sometimes accompany it. This is a difficult problem, but it is an exciting new direction for future work.

What insights do you want business people/readers to gain from your research?

Technological solutions are not a panacea that automatically enables leaders to deal with large amounts of information in today’s workplace. This research uncovers the psychological side of leaders and shows how their mindset and personality also help them deal with information overload. We hope this work expands our understanding of what makes team leaders successful and inspires new research to expand our insights.