Can mindset shape one's leadership style?

Many companies I work or interact with highlight a shortage of good leaders and struggle to figure out how to develop desired leadership behaviors. Leaders themselves often share the challenge of stimulating desired behaviors and enhancing the performance of their followers as they try to drive vision execution or simply manage day-to-day objectives.

In my recent research project, I set to find new tools to help us do better. Enters Mindset. The idea of mindset and its effect on motivation and performance is a prominent concept in social psychology. For over 40 years, Stanford professor Carol Dweck explored people’s self-beliefs about the malleability of personal traits in her research on students' academic performance. She saw that the ability that people wished to prove ("I did not get an A, therefore I am not good at math") had a different feel to it than the ability that people wished to improve ("I didn't get an A, therefore I need to study better next time").

Dweck termed these beliefs as Fixed and Growth Mindset (fixed mindset –believing that one’s qualities are set in stone and growth mindset – the belief that one’s basic qualities are things that one can cultivate through effort) and showed how they drive motivation and behaviors, and more specifically, efforts toward achieving goals. Her newest research projects focused on interventions to stimulate growth mindset.

In recent years, the concepts of Fixed and Growth Mindset trickled down into corporate settings. Here are some of the key elements of the original theory, combined with findings related to mindset and leadership:

While there isn't a lot of research about growth and a fixed mindset at work, there have been quite a lot of studies on the effectiveness of leadership styles.

Namely, the following three are widely discussed in leadership literature, with transformational leadership being considered the most effective style:

• Transformational leaders inspire their followers and increase their motivation to pursue stretch goals. They exhibit four sets of behaviors: individualized consideration (tailor their feedback/communication to the follower's needs), intellectual stimulation, idealized influence (act as role models), and inspirational motivation.
• Transactional leaders motivate followers based on economic principles and clarify how followers will be rewarded for fulfilling their job requirements. 
• Laissez-faire leaders remain hands-off and don't exhibit the above four behaviors of the transformational leader. They are considered the least effective leaders.

Experiment: Can mindset affect a particular leadership style?

Wanting to understand the link between growth mindset and transformational leadership (and fixed mindset and other styles), I designed an online experiment (huge thanks to all of you who participated!). 

In the experiment, half of the participants were shown a puzzle with keywords related to the growth mindset, and the other half were shown a puzzle with keywords related to the fixed mindset. After solving the puzzle, participants were asked to pick their most likely course of action in four different work-related scenarios. The possible answers were related to the above-described leadership styles.  Finally, the participants were asked to respond to questions related to their leadership and mindset beliefs.

The experiment had quite a diverse sample of 179 participants from 24 countries (66% residing in the United States, 10% in Brazil, and the rest other), 67% female, average age 42 (ranging from 21 to 70), 92% employed, 64% with more than 1 direct report. The sample had high levels of education: 75% had a graduate degree, 23% an undergraduate degree. 52% of the participants reported making more than US$125,000 a year.

Unfortunately, as it sometimes happens with experiments, my original manipulation didn't work (I'll do better next time!); the puzzles didn't end up stimulating a particular mindset in the participants. The two experimental groups had shown similar average mindsets and leadership styles. Nevertheless, I found some interesting insights:

1. Growth mindset had a very strong correlation with a preference for the transformational leadership style.
2. Gender and leadership: women were more likely to exhibit the transformational leadership style (this is consistent with previous findings that women had an equal or higher likelihood to be transformational leaders than men. Plus, followers often have had higher expectations of them in this regard!). Women were also slightly more likely to exhibit a transactional leadership style than men. 
3. Gender and mindset: men in the sample had a significantly higher average growth mindset than women. It was an interesting contrast to the two points above!
4. Managerial experience and leadership: transactional leadership style was associated with being a manager. Presumably, it's a skill and a preference that gets acquired over time and trial and error.
5. Other demographic factors like age and income levels didn't have any correlation with leadership style preferences. 

[if you're curious about the nerdy Ph.D. details about the experiment design and findings, you can learn more in my seminar presentation].

Where do we go from here?

Understanding the relationship between growth mindset and transformational leadership has some important implications in terms of how we can evaluate leadership potential and select individuals for training programs, for example. One could prime mindset but one could also invest in leaders who already exhibit it. Moreover, solving puzzles is just a quick priming technique and in future experiments, I may explore how other types of interventions can stimulate growth and fixed mindset and ultimately leadership behaviors.  

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