There's an old saw - cribbed from Plato and popularized by Douglas Adams - that those people who are most interested in leading others are least suited to the task. That's not entirely accurate, yet new research has found a grain of truth in this idea: Many leaders have plenty of ambition to lead, but that's no guarantee others think they're effective.

"Our society assumes that there is a link between leadership ambition and leadership aptitude," explains Francis Flynn, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business. People seeking power and success step up to take leadership roles, and how we select leaders rewards that ambitiousness. "We largely rely on opt-in mechanisms to populate our pools of potential leaders - the people who apply to business schools like Stanford or seek a promotion to the next level in their organizations," Flynn says. "That assumes implicitly that those people who want to lead are the ones who should lead. But is that assumption valid?"

Though it is clear that ambition plays a significant role in who becomes a leader, its link to leadership effectiveness has not been extensively studied. So Flynn, with Shilaan Alzahawi and Emily S. Reit, PhD '22, undertook the first systematic study of that relationship.

The researchers asked more than 450 executives in a leadership development program at Stanford GSB to answer questions about their ambition and rate themselves in 10 areas of competence, including motivating others, managing collaborative work, coaching and developing people, and communicating ideas. The team then asked each executive's managers, peers, and direct reports to rate them on the same competencies.

Not surprisingly, these executives scored high on ambition. Yet there was a discrepancy between how they rated their own leadership ability and how the people they worked with rated them. "We found that individuals with higher levels of ambition are more likely to hold positive views of their own effectiveness," says Alzahawi, a doctoral candidate in organizational behavior at Stanford GSB and a Stanford Data Science Scholar. "However, according to ratings by their managers, direct reports, and peers, these ambitious individuals are no more effective in a leadership role than their less-ambitious peers."

This perception gap was pronounced in 7 of the 10 leadership competencies. While the gap between leaders and their managers and peers was especially prominent, it was slightly less so between leaders and their direct reports. "Indeed, we find anecdotal evidence that direct reports perceive ambitious leaders as better able to motivate others and manage collaborative work," the researchers report.

The executives' gender did not affect the results. "We had thought that women may be better calibrated than men, but we found the same null relationship between ambition and third-party ratings of effectiveness for women," Alzahawi says.

The team conducted additional studies to ensure their findings were not limited to the highly ambitious executives enrolled in the Stanford program. They recruited a nationally representative sample and randomly assigned each participant to a leader or team member role. In this tightly controlled study, even though there was no difference between third-party ratings of the leadership effectiveness of highly ambitious individuals compared to those with lower ambition, Alzahawi says, "We found that highly ambitious individuals are 4 to 10 times more likely to believe they have above-average leadership ability compared to individuals with lower ambition."