A new study just out from James Gross of Stanford University and six other researchers has shown that the higher people go as a leader, the less stress they experience. It turns out that being the CEO is less stressful than being a senior manager. It’s an intriguing idea, as it flies in the face of the current thinking about leadership, which has supported the notion that top leaders are under enormous stress.
But new research in neuroscience tends to support Gross’s findings. One of the big ideas that has emerged out of the connection between neuroscience and leadership is that leaders are largely motivated by what we’ve come to call theSCARF model. SCARF stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness — the five social experiences that create strong threats or rewards in the brain.
From the SCARF perspective, while top leaders might have plenty of stress, they also have lots of rewards (literally activations of the reward center in the brain) that offset this stress.
Author: David Rock
Source: Harvard Business Review
Subject: Organizational Behavior
Click to Add the First »