IÉSEG Insights » Resource Center » Management & Society » The competence mirage: why the leaders we choose aren’t the leaders we need?

The competence mirage: why the leaders we choose aren’t the leaders we need?

10/27/2026

4 min

Concerns have been raised in different media about the marked rise in overbearing or autocratic leadership both in political and corporate spheres, some pointing for example to the persistence of “shouty” and “top-down” management.

According to Gouri MOHAN, Professor of Human Resources, a distinguishing feature of such leadership is its tendency toward self-advancement of the individual at the expense of teams, organizations or wider stakeholder groups.

“More often than not, these individuals seek leadership roles primarily to advance personal goals rather than to serve collective ones,” she explains. “While much has been written about the risks of promoting self-interested leaders, we still know surprisingly little about why they are selected in the first place — and what happens as their limitations become more visible to others over time.”

These are some of the questions she explored in her recent *research with coauthors from Michigan State University, the University of Mississippi (USA), and IESE business school in Spain.

The emergence of leaders in self-managed teams

They examined the emergence of leaders with two distinct motivational profiles: agentic (self-oriented leaders with typical traits including assertiveness and confidence) and communal (group-oriented leaders with typical traits including empathy, active listening, helpfulness).

They did this by following self-managed teams, i.e. teams without formally appointed supervisors, to understand better how perceptions of leadership about different team members developed and evolved over time.

“Our findings show that individuals driven by agentic motives are more likely to be perceived as leaders early on, even after limited interaction, as they are very effective at signaling high personal competence, which translates into impressions of good leadership potential,” she notes.

“However, these early impressions do not endure. As team members continue to work together, initial perceptions of competence attached to self-oriented individuals begin to fade. This especially happens because as teams move to later stages, communal qualities of leaders become more important to manage conflict, motivate performance, and drive collaboration. Therefore, over time, team members with more communal motives that signal both competence and benevolence toward others— become increasingly preferred as leaders.”

In other words, early judgments about who is a good leader are often misplaced. They privilege signals of competence over the communal qualities that underpin effective leadership in the long run.

Yet there is an important complication, according to Professor Mohan: early leaders are not always easily displaced. Having secured initial status as leaders, they tend to have disproportionate power in the team. For example, they hold more decision-making power, their opinions carry more weight, and they have greater influence and visibility, all of which allow them to remain in leadership positions even as perceptions of their competence wane.

For the expert, this raises a pressing question that resonates across both business and politics: are we unintentionally favoring leaders who look competent, while overlooking leaders who can build trust, cohesion, and collaboration over time?

Practical implications of this work

This research highlights that effective leadership needs both agency (self-confidence) and communion. The former is required for decisive, timely action, while the latter helps leaders to align with and serve others effectively.

However, Dr. Mohan believes that an overemphasis on agentic orientation in leaders is problematic for organizations on two levels: “Firstly, it is driven by a short-sighted and assumption that personal ambition will necessarily translate into collective benefit. And secondly, it contributes to leadership choices that may look strong initially but often underperform over time.”

“The implication for organizations is straightforward: slow down the coronation. In practice, this means designing selection processes that look beyond first impressions and prioritizing peer assessments, evaluating how candidates behave in collaborative settings, and building in structured review points as teams develop. The loudest voice in the room is rarely the most valuable one over time.”

Understanding these nuances can help companies better design leadership selection processes and leadership development programs that are more evidence-based, built around long-term performance and collaboration, and incorporate multi-stakeholder views such as weighting peer assessments and evaluating collaborative behavior across hierarchies and department boundaries.

Moreover, the researchers argue that as organizations become increasingly focused on building more agile teams that come together for a brief period, perceptions may be biased in favor of agentic leaders. For instance, in such working contexts, teams may not work together long enough to recognize and appreciate the leadership contributions of more communal leaders. Managers should therefore consider the timescale of the teams they oversee and the needs of those teams over time to assess the strengths and weaknesses of leaders that emerge over different points of time.

*“Rapid Rise Versus Slow Recognition: Motivation to Lead and the Emergence of Informal Leaders in Self-Managing Teams Over Time,” in the Journal of Organizational Behavior (2026).

Gouri Mohan, Dorothy R. Carter, Cynthia K. Maupin, Yih-Teen Lee, Nathan T. Carter