Genes are a touchy subject for many people in the 21st century. In Australia, by belief and principle we are an egalitarian tribe, uneasy with hereditary advantage, and we're rightly sensitive about group judgments of any kind, especially those purporting to be based on science. Yet the direction of science is unmistakable. For a generation, the advantage in the nature-nurture debate has been moving toward nature, with evidence accumulating that genes play a big role in everything from one's politics to one's choice of profession.
In "Born Entrepreneurs, Born Leaders," Scott Shane takes a close look at recent scientific research to assess the role that genes play in careers and career choices. Researchers, he says, have found "that over one-third of the difference between people on virtually every employment-related dimension investigated, including work interest, work values, job satisfaction, job choice, leadership turnover, job performance, and income, is genetic." That still leaves nearly two-thirds of the difference to be accounted for by environmental forces. What's important is that "genetics is accounting for more and more of the difference among us in our work-related behaviours and attitudes."
People have always suspected that, as the saying goes, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, but the evidence in “Born Entrepreneurs, Born Leaders" seems to confirm it.
Testosterone levels—which are primarily hereditary—play an especially interesting role. "Research shows that managers, on average, have higher testosterone levels than computer programmers," Scott Shane writes; and "salesmen, on average, have more of this hormone than teachers."
Genes lie behind the kinds of organisational culture we prefer, Shane says, and how frequently we change jobs. Such claims shouldn't be all that shocking, given that more than half the difference between people in their big five personality traits—openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism—appears to be genetic. As for leadership, Scott Shane cites a study in which 47% of identical twins raised by different parents had the same leadership potential as measured by the California Personality Inventory (a reliable guide, at least in this category).
Cookbookish leadership doesn't work when you are following someone else's recipe. Perhaps, the quote from Dr. Maxwell Maltz of the Psycho-Cybernetic Foundation, about the need to focus our internal energy to make the changes we desire, says it best…
"Trying to implant a goal that is incongruent with the self-image is like trying to plant grain by dropping seeds on rock hard bone-dry ground. No one can consistently out perform his or her self-image. No one can overcome it with willpower. No one can sneak past it and perform in an incongruent manner. The bottom line is that you cannot 'do' things without 'being' the kind of person who does those things. You must 'be' to 'do.' Bottom line: Something that works well for a leader in one company is not easily replicated in another.
Fueled by rapidly evolving technology, the genetics revolution is only beginning. It would be foolish to think that it will leave the workplace untouched.
Reference: Scott Shane: Born Entrepreneurs, Born leaders: How our genes affect our worklife.
