Are Effective Leaders Creative?

TL;DR

This study uses an agent-based model to explore how creative leadership impacts societal cultural fitness, revealing that optimal leadership creativity varies with the society's current level of idea quality.

Contribution

It introduces an agent-based simulation to systematically analyze the relationship between leadership creativity and cultural output fitness.

Findings

Creative leadership boosts societal cultural fitness.

High creativity is most effective when idea fitness is low.

Less creative leadership becomes optimal as idea fitness increases.

Abstract

This paper explains in layperson's terms how an agent-based model was used to investigate the widely held belief that creativity is an important component of effective leadership. Creative leadership was found to increase the mean fitness of cultural outputs across an artificial society, but the more creative the followers were, the greater the extent to which the beneficial effect of creative leadership was washed out. Early in a run when the fitness of ideas was low, a form of leadership that entails the highest possible degree of creativity was best for the mean fitness of outputs across the society. As the mean fitness of outputs increased a transition inevitably occurs after which point a less creative style of leadership proved most effective. Implications of these findings are discussed.