Original title: The leadership hypothesis: what we know, and don't know, about leadership's effectiveness
The paper reviews evidence about whether leadership helps organizations perform better and whether leadership training improves results. It treats leadership as a chain: personal traits can shape a leader’s actions, those actions can shape the workplace, and the workplace can affect performance. But many studies use opinions or correlations, which cannot show that leadership caused the outcome. The authors call for stronger tests, including experiments and carefully designed comparisons.
Imagine a coach changing how a team practices. The players may follow the new routine, but that alone does not show the change caused the team to win; injuries, opponents, or other changes could matter too. In this paper, changed practice is like changed leader behavior, and winning is like better organizational performance: showing the first does not prove the second.
Organizations spend time and money developing leaders, while workers and managers live with the results. The review explains why evidence of changed behavior is not enough to prove better organizational performance—and why stronger tests matter before claiming those benefits.
The abstract does not report a specific intervention, dataset, or measured effect size. The review describes limits in the available evidence, but it does not establish whether leadership or leadership development improves organizational performance. It calls for stronger causal tests rather than reporting their results.
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The leadership hypothesis: what we know, and don't know, about leadership's effectiveness — Lorne Michael Hartman — Acta Psychologica Reports — doi:10.1016/j.aprep.2026.100003
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.