Neuroscience of Leadership and Teams Lab (NeuroLead)

Human cognitive and behavioural phenomena—including leadership—involve much more than people are consciously aware of, and often cannot be captured by existing methods such as surveys. To address this gap, the Leadership Lab engages experts from multiple disciplines, including leadership, psychology, and neuroscience. The lab’s experts are pioneers in the application of neurophysiological techniques to examine the subconscious and covert effects of effective and ineffective leadership, such as the bias resulting from prejudice and racism against minority populations in the workplace. The team combines these innovative practices with established empirical approaches to studying leadership, including surveys, behavioural observation, and behavioural interventions.

The expert team builds on extant research from two disparate lines of research: i) strategic management and organizational behaviour, ii) evolutionary biology and social neuroscience research. The lab’s experts argue that individuals follow signals from leaders that synchronize their behaviours, emotions, and neurophysiology, increasing their chances to bond, consequently leading to effective teams and organizations. For example, leader fairness, charisma, and sexist rhetoric have been separately manipulated to examine their effects on team members’ synchrony in heartrate and facial expressions. The lab was able to demonstrate that manipulations of these common leader phenomena influenced synchrony in ways that impacted team performance.