Measuring Human Leadership Skills with Artificially Intelligent Agents

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that leadership skills with AI agents can predict human leadership effectiveness, offering a new method for assessing social and decision-making skills in team settings.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel approach where AI agents serve as proxies to measure and predict human leadership and teamwork skills.

Findings

Leadership with AI correlates with human team impact.

Successful leaders ask more questions and engage more.

Leadership skills are linked to social intelligence and decision-making.

Abstract

We show that the ability to lead groups of humans is predicted by leadership skill with Artificially Intelligent agents. In a large pre-registered lab experiment, human leaders worked with AI agents to solve problems. Their performance on this 'AI leadership test' was strongly correlated with their causal impact on human teams, which we estimate by repeatedly randomly assigning leaders to groups of human followers and measuring team performance. Successful leaders of both humans and AI agents ask more questions and engage in more conversational turn-taking; they score higher on measures of social intelligence, fluid intelligence, and decision-making skill, but do not differ in gender, age, ethnicity or education. Our findings indicate that AI agents can be effective proxies for human participants in social experiments, which greatly simplifies the measurement of leadership and teamwork skills.