Virtues of Introversion and Intuition for Leaders

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

But going with your gut doesn't work for all leaders in every situation. New research co-authored by Dustin Sleesman, associate professor of management in the University of Delaware's Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics, explored the concept of intuition and when it's helpful for leaders who are in charge of large teams.

Sleesman and his co-authors found that teams performed better when their leaders were armed with high amounts of information. Without a high information load, intuition didn't result in a performance advantage.

In Leader Intuition: Good or Bad for Multiteam System Performance? The Roles of Information Load and Introversion, published in the August edition of Group & Organization Management, Sleesman 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, which gave the researchers an opportunity to observe and analyze their behavior.

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

• Intuition thrives on information. When leaders need to process a lot of information, intuition can be a valuable cognitive tool to help them integrate and make sense of it - and then use that knowledge to coordinate the team.

• If there is not an ample amount of information to process, intuition isn't a good fit for the situation.
• According to Sleesman, "intuition resulted in an even higher team performance boost if those leaders were introverted because it gives them an inward, reflective, and observational focus. As a result, they appeared to get even more value from their intuition."

Sleesman offers insights into what inspires his work and what business professionals can take away from his research.

What inspires your research?

I have always been fascinated by how people think and make decisions, whether it's crucial life- or career-shaping topics or just everyday things we deal with. I'm especially interested in how people are influenced by factors that are outside of their awareness: those "invisible" forces all around us.

Your article is about when team leaders should use intuition to make decisions. Why is this important?

In contemporary management and leadership education, intuition has become somewhat of a "dirty" word because we know it can fool us into making biased decisions. For example, relying on intuition can anchor us too tightly to our previous experiences and assumptions. As a result, 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 like statistical modeling and formal decision methods.

But at the same time, you can't deny the power of the human brain! There is a growing body of research showing that intuition can actually be very helpful in some situations. The key question is: what are those situations? We already know that intuition can be beneficial in situations when we have domain expertise and when the decision to be made is subjective, like creativity-based tasks.

Our research offered new insights by demonstrating that the amount of information that leaders need to process in their job role might also be relevant. We also recognized that today's workplace is becoming more collaborative and team-based than ever before, so we were especially interested in leaders who oversee complex, multi-team systems.

You also look at the differences between introverted and extroverted leaders. Is one better than the other?

In both research and practice, extraversion has overwhelmingly been considered a beneficial trait for leaders. Most people associate effective leadership with being active, assertive, energetic and talkative - which are all aspects of extraversion. But many extraverted people aren't very good at "turning off" some of these things. They sometimes talk too much, are too assertive, and so on.

By contrast, introverted people tend to be more reflective, and they are more likely to observe and listen to others, taking time to work out an idea or solution before taking action. Their preference to gather information (which is ample in high information load situations) makes this personality trait a great fit for intuition.

A small, but growing number of researchers have explored the virtues of these aspects to highlight how introversion can actually be an asset for leaders, contrary to popular belief. History gives us many examples of people who were introverted, yet highly successful leaders: Bill Gates, Abraham Lincoln, and Mahatma Gandhi, just to name a few.

What surprised you about the research outcomes?

In this research, we also measured leaders' analytical cognitive style, 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 paper 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 aren't strongly related to each other. In other words, if someone doesn't have a high intuitive style, it does not mean they have a high analytical style. Despite this, I still expected an analytical cognitive style to drive performance to some degree, but an intuitive cognitive style appeared to be much more powerful.

What can we expect to happen next because of this body of work?

In today's workplace, leaders are increasingly facing larger and larger amounts of information to process in order to be successful in their jobs. This is very demanding from a psychological perspective. Some research has identified solutions to this problem, including efforts to simplify information, use better technology and software (like artificial intelligence), restructure organizations and teams, and so on.

But our research is the first to demonstrate intuition as a potential solution. The next step is to find out what leaders can do to leverage their intuition and yet push aside the biases that sometimes accompany it. This is a tough problem to solve, but it's an exciting new direction for future work.

What do you want business professionals/readers to take away from your research?

Technological solutions aren't a silver bullet that automatically enables leaders to handle high amounts of information in today's workplace. This research uncovers the psychological side of leaders in terms of how their thinking styles and personality are also tools to help them manage information overload. Hopefully this work expands our understanding of what makes team leaders successful and sparks new research to expand our findings.