Toward a Sociogenomic Model of Leadership: A Theoretical Overview

Abstract

In this article, we address biological models of individual organizational behavior, giving special attention to biological models of leadership. We believe that current approaches to biology in the organizational sciences assume that biological systems are simultaneously causal and essentially static. In contrast, we present a sociogenomic approach to leadership research. Sociogenomics is an interactionist approach, but its great strength derives from its power to explain how genes and environment operate, and so how they interact. The key insight is that both genes and the environment operate by modifying gene expression. This leads to a conception of genetic and environmental effects in leadership that is fundamentally dynamic, rather than the comparatively static interpretations of classical biometric approaches. We briefly review the behavioral genetics research within the leadership field, and then we interpret results of the behavioral genetics studies from the standpoint of sociogenomics. We then contrast these interpretations with existing approaches to genetics in leadership research. Finally, we outline some broad avenues of research that the sociogenomic approach indicates may be fruitful for a greater understanding of the biological substrates of leadership, the nature of leadership constructs, and the design of leadership interventions. We emphasize the utility of the sociogenomic perspective for leadership as a meta-theoretic framework, even for researchers who do not take an explicitly biological approach.