Ambition may help individuals rise to leadership positions, but does it make them better leaders? A new study published in PNAS Nexus suggests not. The research shows that although ambitious leaders often rate themselves as effective, third-party evaluations from colleagues and subordinates indicate that ambition is not a strong indicator of leadership success. This disconnect highlights the potential flaws in relying on self-selection for leadership roles.
The researchers were motivated to explore the assumption that ambitious individuals—those who actively seek leadership roles—are also likely to be more effective leaders. Leadership roles often come with substantial personal, financial, and professional rewards, so it’s common for ambitious people to strive for these positions.
Many organizations rely on self-selection, meaning that individuals put themselves forward for leadership roles, but this practice assumes that those with the drive to lead are the best candidates for the job. However, this belief hadn’t been rigorously tested.
“Leaders are critical to the success of individuals, teams, organizations, and society at large. Yet, human beings often struggle to select the best leaders,” explained study author Shilaan Alzahawi, a PhD candidate at Stanford Graduate School of Business and a Stanford Data Science Scholar.
“Our goal was to understand why, despite the strong incentives at play, we often fail to place the right person in charge. In this paper, we find that individuals with higher levels of ambition are more likely to emerge as leaders and to hold positive views of their own effectiveness; however, according to ratings by managers, direct reports, expert judges, team members, and peers, ambitious individuals are no more effective in a leadership role than their less-ambitious peers.”
To examine the link between ambition and leadership effectiveness, the researchers collected data from a sample of 472 managers who were enrolled in an executive education program at a prominent West Coast business school in the United States. These managers were part of a leadership development program and were required to participate in a 360-degree leadership assessment, which gathered feedback from multiple sources: their managers, peers, subordinates, and the leaders themselves.
The study was conducted in two waves. In the first wave, ambition and leadership effectiveness were measured at different time points, ranging from 27 days to several months apart. In the second wave, the time gap between these measurements was even longer, spanning 1.5 to 2 years. This approach was designed to minimize the potential bias that could occur if the leaders’ ambition and their effectiveness were measured at the same time.
Each executive was asked to complete a self-report questionnaire on their ambition, which included items like “I am highly motivated to get promoted quickly and often” and “It’s important to me to attain a high-status position in my career.” These responses were rated on a seven-point scale and averaged to form a single score for each leader’s ambition.
To assess leadership effectiveness, the researchers used data from the 360-degree evaluations. These evaluations measured ten leadership competencies, including motivating others, decision-making, managing collaborative work, and handling conflict. Managers, peers, subordinates, and the leaders themselves rated the leaders on these competencies. By comparing the self-ratings with 3,830 third-party ratings (i.e., feedback from others), the researchers could assess whether ambitious leaders were actually seen as more effective by the people they worked with.
The results of the study revealed a notable discrepancy between how ambitious leaders viewed themselves and how others perceived their effectiveness. Leaders who reported high levels of ambition consistently rated themselves as more effective across multiple leadership dimensions. This self-assessment aligns with the idea that ambitious individuals are driven to achieve and likely to see themselves as competent and capable in leadership roles.
However, when the researchers looked at how these leaders were evaluated by others—specifically their managers, peers, and subordinates—they found no evidence that ambition was linked to higher ratings of effectiveness. In other words, leaders with higher ambition were not seen as more effective by the people around them, regardless of the type of leadership competency being measured. This discrepancy was evident across various competencies, including decision-making, managing collaborative work, and coaching others.
For example, when looking at specific leadership competencies such as accountability, motivating others, and managing collaborative work, ambitious leaders consistently rated themselves higher. However, third-party raters did not observe the same level of effectiveness in these areas.
Interestingly, the feedback from different groups (managers, peers, and subordinates) was fairly consistent. None of these groups rated ambitious leaders as more effective than less ambitious ones, indicating that ambition alone does not make a leader more successful in the eyes of those they lead or work with.
“At first, the findings surprised us,” Alzahawi told PsyPost. “Ambition is a great example of agentic behavior, and we already know from the leadership literature that agency strongly predicts leadership evaluations. So, based on the overlap between ambition and agency, we should expect a positive relationship between leadership ambition and evaluations of effectiveness.”
“In addition, social scientists often assume that status hierarchies are relatively functional, where groups allocate status to members who contribute most to group success. This theorizing would suggest that people are incentivized to “calibrate” their ambition because they would be socially punished for being too ambitious.”
Previous research, Alzahawi noted, has also shown that individuals are typically accurate in assessing their status within groups and tend to pursue leadership roles only when they believe they can contribute significantly, suggesting that more competent people are likely to seek such positions.
“But then, we considered how many incompetent people end up running companies, schools, even countries, and we realized, ‘Yeah, maybe leadership selection is not perfectly efficient,’” Alzahawi said.
The findings challenge a common assumption in leader selection processes: that individuals who aspire to lead are also best suited for leadership roles. The study suggests that the ambition to lead doesn’t necessarily correlate with being more skilled or effective in leadership. Ambitious leaders might hold a more positive view of their own leadership abilities, but this self-perception is not necessarily shared by others.
“Most leader selection processes, in organizations, business schools, and even entire democracies, rely on some form of self-selection into the candidate pool for leadership roles,” Alzahawi said. “That is, individuals have to actively choose whether they’d like to be considered for leadership roles – in more formal terms, they have to ‘opt in’ to the pool.”
“Our work implies that this opt-in leader selection mechanism may result in candidate pools that are dominated by individuals with high ambition – a trait that is not indicative of high leadership potential. Based on these findings, we recommend that institutions de-emphasize ambition as a factor in the selection process and instead (1) solicit a wider, more representative pool of applicants, (2) emphasize factors that are known to predict leadership effectiveness, such as intelligence and prosociality, and (3) find ways to target and inspire individuals with low ambition and high leadership potential.”
Although this study provides valuable insights into the relationship between ambition and leadership effectiveness, it also has certain limitations, like any research. First, the sample was drawn from executives enrolled in a leadership development program at a specific business school, which may limit the generalizability of the findings. In addition, the study was conducted in a U.S.-based context, where ambition is often highly valued. In other cultural contexts, where modesty and collective success are more highly regarded, the link between ambition and leadership effectiveness may differ.
“Executives enrolled in a leadership development program at a West Coast University in the United States tend to be highly ambitious to start with, and they are relatively similar on important demographics such as their gender, age, race, and socioeconomic status,” Alzahawi told PsyPost. “As a result, one could argue that the findings stem from selection bias – perhaps we just didn’t find a relationship between ambition and effectiveness because of what’s called ‘range restriction’ in our ambition variable, and perhaps the findings apply only to this sample of people with high ambition.”
“To make sure this isn’t the case, we ran an additional study in which we circumvented selection bias and range restriction. We partnered with a company to recruit a nationally representative sample in terms of our participants’ gender, age, location, race/ethnicity, and income, which also led to a sample with greater variation in their ambition – some people were highly ambitious like our executive sample, but we also had many participants who were perfectly content not to vie for a leadership role. Next, rather than letting these participants self-select into leadership roles, we randomly assigned each participant to either a leader role or a team member role.”
“In this study, in which we circumvented selection effects and range restriction by relying on a nationally representative sample with random assignment of a leadership role, we again replicated the found null relationship between ambition and third-party evaluations of leader effectiveness,” Alzahawi explained. “In other words, we found that our findings generalize to this nationally representative sample.”
“While this does alleviate our concerns about the executive sample already being highly ambitious to start with, we do believe that this is very much a U.S. based finding. It’s possible that our work would not replicate in a non-Western context, in which ambition might not be as highly valued as it is in the United States. I think this would be a really interesting direction for future research.”
The researchers noted that ambitious individuals might emerge as leaders due to their drive for status, power, and recognition, rather than their ability to lead effectively. Future studies could investigate whether interventions aimed at fostering ambition in individuals with high leadership potential (but low initial ambition) could lead to better leadership outcomes.
“Ultimately, I hope to identify a systemic lever that can foster diversity in upper-level positions and promote workplace advancement for individuals with high leadership potential,” Alzahawi said.
The study, “A legend in one’s own mind: The link between ambition and leadership evaluations,” was authored by Shilaan Alzahawi, Emily S. Reit, and Francis J. Flynn.
