Is good leadership contagious?

If you’re a good leader, do you make the people around you more likely to become good leaders as well? In other words, is good leadership “contagious”?

We already know that happiness can be contagious and you’re more likely to be overweight if you have overweight friends, and split up with your spouse if you have a close friend who’s divorced.

In an article for Harvard Business Review, behavioural statisticians Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman explain how this “social contagion” affects leaders, and which kinds of emotions or behavioural traits they are most likely to pass on to others.

To find out the answer, Zenger and Folkman – CEO and President, respectively, of the Zenger/Folkman leadership development consultancy – studied 360-degree feedback assessments of senior executives and their direct reports, who were mid-level managers.

They looked at 51 different types of behaviour and found significant correlations in more than 30 of them.

Some behaviours were more contagious than others. Behaviours with the highest correlations between senior managers and their direct reports were clustered around the following themes, listed in order of most to least contagious:

-Developing self and others

-Technical skills

-Strategy skills

-Consideration and cooperation

-Integrity and honesty

-Global perspective

-Decisiveness

-Results focus

Their research also looked at how the overall performance of leaders affects mid-level managers. They found the direct reports of the worst performing senior managers were also below-average performers, while the reverse was true for effective leaders.

This trickle-down effect continues all the way through organizations. In the 360-degree assessment, subordinates were asked to rate their own levels of engagement and Zenger and Folkman compared their scores with the effectiveness of their senior managers.

As the graph below shows, good leaders increase employee engagement throughout their organization. Conversely, it also shows that ineffective senior managers decrease the engagement of their direct reports, and the people working for them, too.