Introverted Vs Extroverted Leadership Essay

Many studies demonstrated the positive impact that extroverts and introverts have on each other when they work together. Wharton management professor Adam Grant has hypothesized that extroverted leaders would enhance group performance when working with passive employees, while introverted leaders are more effective when working with proactive employees. To test this idea, he and two of his colleagues conducted a pair of studies. In the first study, they analyzed data taken from a popular American pizza chain. They discovered that the weekly profits of the stores managed by extroverted leaders were 16 percent higher than the profits of those led by introverted leaders, but only when the employees were passive types who tended to accept their roles without challenge or exercising initiatives. On the contrary, stores led by introverted leaders outperformed those led by extroverted leaders by more than 14 percent when their employees took initiatives in actively trying to improve work procedures.

They were asked to fold as many T-shirt as possible in ten minutes. Without informing the participants, each team included two actors. In some teams, the two actors acted passively, always following the leader’s instructions. In other teams, one of the actors asked the other members if any of them knew more efficient way to fold T-shirts. The other actor proposed a technique that he learned from his friend before. The results were striking. The introverted leaders showed a higher tendency (20 percent more likely) to follow the suggestion, and their teams had better performance (24 percent better) than the teams of the extroverted leaders. When the followers were passive, however, the teams led by extroverts had better performance in the task than those led by the introverts (22