The studies behind the advice

A 120-item public-domain inventory recovers the thirty-facet structure of the Five Factor Model at acceptable reliability, developed on 21,588 respondents and tested on samples up to 619,150.

Each Big Five domain separates into two distinct aspects, giving a level between the five domains and the thirty facets.

Specifies fifteen facets nested three to a domain, controls for acquiescent responding, and shows greater bandwidth, fidelity and predictive power than the original BFI across two validation samples.

Genetic factors account for roughly 40 to 50 percent of the variance in Big Five traits, with most of the remainder non-shared environment.

Each Big Five trait has candidate biological systems, with the evidence strongest for extraversion and neuroticism.

Culture shapes both how traits are expressed and how trait questions are answered, so the same score can carry different meaning across cultures.

How clear and consistent a person's own disposition is moderates their behavior in the same way situational strength does, making the person side of the interaction symmetric with the situation side.

Traits treated as desirable carry costs and traits treated as dark carry benefits, depending on which outcome is measured and in what setting.

Across 207 intervention studies trait measures moved about d = .37 over an average of 24 weeks; emotional stability changed most and extraversion next, the change replicated in non-clinical interventions, and it persisted at follow-up.

Narrow conscientiousness facets add prediction of job performance beyond global conscientiousness, and how much they add depends on the performance criterion and the occupation.

The Big Five predicted job performance more strongly in weak situations, with less structure and fewer constraints, and when the job's demands called for that particular trait.

More extraverted leadership went with higher group performance when employees were passive and lower performance when they were proactive, because extraverted leaders were less receptive to employees' ideas.

Big Five relations vary by criterion; conscientiousness is the most consistent general job-performance correlate.

Stable dispositions can produce different behavior patterns across psychologically meaningful situations.

Across 222 correlations, associations with leadership were extraversion .31, conscientiousness .28, openness .24, neuroticism -.24, agreeableness .08; extraversion was the most consistent across settings.

Task, social, and organizational cues activate or constrain trait expression.

Big Five traits relate differently to transformational and transactional leadership dimensions, with extraversion the strongest and most consistent correlate of transformational leadership.

Leader behavior explains more variance than traits alone, supporting behavior as the development lever.

Across experience sampling the typical person routinely shows nearly all levels of all five traits; the central tendency is almost perfectly stable, and how much someone varies is itself a stable individual difference.

Individual differences relate to leader effectiveness, but distal traits operate through skills and behavior.

Leadership training works, and how much it works depends on design, delivery and implementation choices rather than on the training existing.

Across 71 samples and 7,535 people, emotional stability and ambition predict adaptive performance at work while openness does not contribute to it.

Teams whose members believed it was safe to take interpersonal risks, such as asking questions, admitting errors and raising concerns, showed more learning behavior, and that learning behavior helped explain team performance.

Expected tangible rewards tied to doing, finishing or performing a task reduced people's later free-choice interest in it; positive feedback increased that interest.

Across 136 samples (over 22,000 people, nearly 5,000 groups), psychological safety was associated with task performance, citizenship behavior, engagement and learning, and supportive leader relations and work design predicted it.

A manager's openness to ideas predicted employees raising improvement ideas more consistently than transformational leadership did, through employees' sense that speaking up was safe, and mattered most for the best performers.

Across 713 samples from 515 studies, contact between groups usually reduced prejudice, and the effect extended to the whole other group; contact with equal status, shared goals, cooperation and backing from authority reduced it more, though those conditions were not essential.

After a merger, people from the dominant partner kept their identification with the organization; people from the dominated partner kept less of it, and perceived differences between the partners lowered their identification more.

Leader characteristics were the strongest predictors of being excluded at work, and exclusion was strongly linked to deviance and to lower performance, voice, well-being and job attitudes.

Fairness of outcomes, of process, of personal treatment and of explanations each added to how fair people judged things, and each had its own links to satisfaction, commitment, views of the authority, citizenship, withdrawal and performance.

Trust was repaired better by apologizing for a competence failure but denying an integrity failure, and by apologizing when later evidence showed guilt but denying when it showed innocence.

Across 105 samples, empowering leadership was linked to higher performance, citizenship and creativity for individuals and teams, working through trust in the leader and employees' sense of empowerment.

Employees who saw their supervisor as abusive reported consistently worse outcomes, though how strong the links were depended on how each study was designed.

Across 79 quantitative studies (1948-2007), people's reactions to change depended on who they were and the setting before the change, and on the change process, its perceived benefit or harm and its content; those reactions shaped work and personal outcomes.

Conflict signals recruit cognitive control rather than guarantee a correct response.

Acute and chronic stress alter cognition and adaptation through allostatic processes.

Medial frontal systems contribute to interpreting self, others, and social action.

Social exclusion recruits neural systems associated with distress and conflict.

Affective signals can shape choice before people can articulate the relevant rule.

Uncontrollable stress can rapidly weaken prefrontal working memory and top-down control.

Social judgment depends on interacting systems for mentalizing, affect, and self-regulation.

Reciprocal cooperation engages reward-related circuitry that may reinforce continued cooperation.

Reciprocity history shapes future trust and corresponding learning signals.

Value, fairness, intentions, and social learning jointly shape interpersonal decisions.

Acute stress modestly impaired working memory and cognitive flexibility; its effect on inhibition depended on the kind of inhibition measured.

Derives prestige from cultural learning: deference buys proximity to a skilled model, group-level deference then guides new learners, and this produces a preference for models who merely appear popular.

Dominance (force and intimidation, inducing fear) and prestige (shared expertise, earning respect) are distinct strategies, and both attain real influence over others.

Leading and following help solve recurring coordination problems, but followers remain alert to exploitation.

Initiative, competence, intelligence, and generosity recur in leader emergence; the review finds no link between leadership and dominance.

Leadership and followership are coordination processes shared across human and nonhuman groups.

Leaders hold more capital - age-related knowledge, body size, social connections - which lowers the costs they themselves bear and raises the efficacy of leading.

Elected leaders rank high on physical dominance, kin support and trustworthiness, and those ranks predict group performance only where members have a history of collaborating; leaders take no larger share.

Followers expect masculine-faced leaders to compete and feminine-faced leaders to cooperate, and prefer whichever facial cue matches the situation, so appearance alone shifts who is preferred with intergroup context.

Reviews political leadership across evolutionary anthropology and argues leadership studies are biased toward industrialized societies and lack cross-cultural and ethological reference.

Modern leadership can fail through context mismatch, selection bias, and exploitation risk.

Cooperation can persist in repeated interaction when future consequences and reciprocity matter.

Groups can sustain collective action through locally legitimate rules, monitoring, and graduated responses.

If some people care about equity, competitive and bargaining results both follow; the economic environment decides whether fair or selfish types dominate the equilibrium.

Five distinct mechanisms sustain cooperation: kin selection, direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, network reciprocity and group selection, each with its own condition.

Trust decisions and reciprocity are shaped by expectations and interaction history.

Cooperators will punish free riders even when punishing is costly to them and returns no material benefit, and free riders are punished more heavily the further they deviate.

Eliciting contribution schedules directly, 50 percent of subjects are conditional cooperators who give more as others give more, and about a third free-ride completely.

Alternating public-goods rounds with indirect-reciprocity rounds sustains the shared resource, because the need to keep a reputation for the second carries into the first.

People may choose institutions that deter free riding when those institutions prove effective.

Punishment costs exceed the gains from cooperation over 10 periods and is unambiguously beneficial over 50, so the time horizon decides whether sanctioning pays.

Frames leadership as three entangled roles - adaptive, administrative and enabling - holding a dynamic relationship between an organization's bureaucratic functions and the informal dynamics of a complex adaptive system.

Argues that complexity theory directs leadership at behaviors that enable organizational effectiveness rather than determine or guide it, widening leadership beyond its psychological and social-psychological framings.

Argues the leader-follower-shared-goals ontology is losing its use as work becomes peer-like and collaborative, and proposes direction, alignment and commitment in its place.

Proposes that leadership in a complex adaptive system acts on the organization indirectly, mediated by organizational identity and social movements; the model is offered for testing rather than tested.

Places the adaptive function as an interactive process between adaptive leadership, which is agentic, and complexity dynamics, which are not, working in combination with administrative functions; offered as propositions, not tested.

Leaders can disrupt stale patterns, encourage novelty, and help others interpret emerging events.

Across three empirical studies the same four conditions precede emergence - disequilibrium, amplifying actions, recombination, stabilizing feedback - and nine leader behaviors are identified that generate them.

Argues strategic leaders matter in a self-organizing system by moving it toward the edge of chaos and by influencing the tags that structure how agents interact, using dialogue and storytelling to build shared meaning.

Sorts issues into five contexts - simple, complicated, complex, chaotic, disorder - and argues each calls for a different response, so recognizing the context precedes acting in it.

Leaders keep organizations adaptable by creating 'adaptive space', where new ideas from the edges can connect to the formal operating system and be taken up by it.

Intuition can be trusted only when the environment is regular enough to predict and the person has had the chance to learn its regularities; feeling confident is not a reliable sign of being right.