Personality and effective leadership: The relationship between openness and theory of mind
Presentation Type
Abstract
Faculty Advisor
Jennifer Bragger
Access Type
Event
Start Date
25-4-2025 12:00 PM
End Date
25-4-2025 1:00 PM
Description
Personality traits play a crucial role in shaping leadership effectiveness, with research linking key dimensions of the Big Five Inventory (BFI; John, Donahue, & Kentle, 1991) to effective leadership (Ali, 2022). Among these traits, openness to experience is a key personality trait that includes being receptive to novel ideas. (McCrae & Greenberg, 2014). The current study expands prior research by testing whether openness to experience is also related to one’s Theory of Mind (ToM) - a cognitive ability that includes being able to understand another’s thoughts and emotions. ToM may also be related to effective leadership, and by hypothesis openness to others. We hypothesize that openness to experience will be positively related to ToM. We tested leaders across different organizational contexts (N = 109) on the BFI and three established ToM measures: Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC; Dziobek et al., 2006), Reading the Mind in the Eyes (RME) task (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001), and the Yoni task (Baron-Cohen, 1995). The results showed a positive, significant relationship between openness to experience and the Yoni (r = 0.230, p < .05); the correlations with the MASC and RME were not significant. Thus, openness to experience may be related to ToM in leaders. Future research could explore the link between openness to experience and other ToM measures.
Personality and effective leadership: The relationship between openness and theory of mind
Personality traits play a crucial role in shaping leadership effectiveness, with research linking key dimensions of the Big Five Inventory (BFI; John, Donahue, & Kentle, 1991) to effective leadership (Ali, 2022). Among these traits, openness to experience is a key personality trait that includes being receptive to novel ideas. (McCrae & Greenberg, 2014). The current study expands prior research by testing whether openness to experience is also related to one’s Theory of Mind (ToM) - a cognitive ability that includes being able to understand another’s thoughts and emotions. ToM may also be related to effective leadership, and by hypothesis openness to others. We hypothesize that openness to experience will be positively related to ToM. We tested leaders across different organizational contexts (N = 109) on the BFI and three established ToM measures: Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC; Dziobek et al., 2006), Reading the Mind in the Eyes (RME) task (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001), and the Yoni task (Baron-Cohen, 1995). The results showed a positive, significant relationship between openness to experience and the Yoni (r = 0.230, p < .05); the correlations with the MASC and RME were not significant. Thus, openness to experience may be related to ToM in leaders. Future research could explore the link between openness to experience and other ToM measures.
Comments
Poster presentation at the 2025 Student Research Symposium.