Research on CEO Personalities

About this report

CEOs are not psychologically random occupants of their role. Decades of research — and, as you'll see here, our own large-scale testing data — show that the people who reach the top of organizations differ from everyone below them in measurable, patterned ways.

They are wired to want authority. They tend to lead in a distinctive, results-first style. And across the broad academic literature, they cluster toward a recognizable trait profile. This report brings three streams of evidence together into a single resource for CEOs — and for the people who study, coach, or aspire to join them.

It opens with original findings from two Leadership IQ assessments — the What Motivates You? test and the Leadership Styles Test — drawn from tens of thousands of working professionals. It then widens the lens to the peer-reviewed research on CEO personality: what the meta-analyses show, how CEOs compare with managers and employees, and what causes those differences.

The goal is not to reduce any executive to a single "type." As the research repeatedly warns, CEOs are highly heterogeneous, and the same trait can help or hurt depending on context. The goal is to give you an honest, evidence-based mirror — a way to see the tendencies that statistically distinguish the corner office, and to think about how those tendencies play out in your own leadership.

Part I — The pull of power

Everyone is motivated by something at work, but not by the same thing. Through research with thousands of employees and leaders, Leadership IQ identified five major motivational drivers behind people's actions on the job: Achievement, Power, Affiliation, Security, and Adventure. The What Motivates You? test assesses which of these is a person's primary intrinsic driver.

The power driver

People who are driven by a need for power aren't looking for a Napoleonic "I want to command the world" kind of dominance — but they do want to be recognized for being influential. They love to be in charge, and they will even choose a high-ranking title over money. They want to direct others and to hold the authority to make decisions that affect other people. The need for power often includes a desire to be revered and followed.

It is not hard to see why this driver would be over-represented at the top of an organization. The CEO role is fundamentally about directing others and holding decision-making authority. What the data reveals, though, is just how sharply concentrated the power motive becomes as you climb.

CEOs are far more likely to be power-driven

In our sample of the What Motivates You? test — more than 19,000 respondents — top-level executives were 97% more likely to be primarily power-driven than everyone else. Put differently, an executive is nearly twice as likely to have Power as their dominant motivator compared with the rest of the working population.

The pattern is a clean, rising gradient. The power motive is comparatively rare among individual contributors and grows at every step up the hierarchy — reaching its peak in the executive suite:

Relative to individual contributors specifically, executives are more than 2.5 times as likely to be power-driven (11.5% versus 4.4%). This is one of the sharpest motivational divides in the entire dataset. It suggests that the desire for influence and authority isn't just a nice-to-have for reaching the top — it functions almost like a selection filter. People who are energized by directing others and holding decision rights are the ones who keep pursuing, and winning, the roles that offer exactly that.

For a sitting CEO, the practical implication cuts two ways. The power drive can be a genuine strength — it fuels the appetite to take charge, make consequential calls, and shape direction. But the motivations that feel obvious to a power-driven leader (visibility, authority, the corner office) may do little to move the achievement-, affiliation-, or security-driven people who make up the bulk of any workforce.

Part II — The Pragmatist edge

Motivation is about what pulls a leader. Leadership style is about how they show up once they're in charge. Leadership IQ's research identifies four fundamental leadership styles — Pragmatist, Idealist, Steward, and Diplomat. Each can be effective or ineffective, and there are countless subtle variations, but the four styles capture real philosophical differences in how leaders motivate, guide, and develop their teams.

The Pragmatist leadership style

Pragmatists have high standards, and they expect both themselves and their team members to meet those standards. They are driven, competitive, and they value hitting their goals above all else. They can be bold, visionary thinkers — unafraid to press forward even when others feel anxious — and they are hard-driving, often relishing the chance to smash through obstacles. Rather than delegating from a distance, the Pragmatist prefers to stay hands-on and deeply involved.

Working for a Pragmatist can be difficult but rewarding. The job is not for the faint-of-heart or thin-skinned, but the opportunity to learn under a Pragmatist's tutelage is second-to-none — the experience can feel like an apprenticeship to a master artist or professor. This style pushes people to develop both their strengths and their weaknesses, which creates real potential for exceptional growth, but also for burnout and criticism. Bottom-line results can sometimes outpace softer measures like employee engagement.

Notably, the Pragmatist is the least common of the four styles, accounting for only about 8–12% of American leaders. Yet top-level executives are disproportionately Pragmatists compared with managers, directors, and vice presidents. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jeff Bezos, and Steve Jobs are all, by observation, Pragmatists.

CEOs are more likely to be Pragmatists

Our sample of the Leadership Styles Test — more than 35,000 respondents — confirms the pattern directly. Top-level executives were 60% more likely to have a Pragmatist leadership style than leaders at every other level combined, and roughly twice as likely as individual contributors.

As with the power motive, the Pragmatist style becomes steadily more common the higher you look in the organization:

The convergence here is striking. Two independent assessments, measuring different things — one intrinsic motivation, the other leadership behavior — point at the same profile. The people who reach the executive suite are disproportionately those who want authority (Power) and who lead through a driven, competitive, goal-first approach (Pragmatist). These are two faces of the same agentic orientation: a strong pull toward taking charge and getting results.

A note on the other styles

This report focuses on the Pragmatist because that is where executives stand out most. It's worth knowing, though, that the Pragmatist is still a minority style even among CEOs. In our executive sample, the Diplomat — the affiliative, harmony-building style — remains the single most common style, just as it is across the general population. The Pragmatist finding is about relative concentration, not majority: executives are far more likely than others to be Pragmatists, even though most executives lead in other styles. The full picture of any leadership team will always be a mix.

Part III — The personality science of CEOs

Our assessment data shows what distinguishes executives on motivation and style. The wider academic literature fills in the rest of the picture: which broad personality traits predict who reaches the top, how CEOs compare with the people they lead, and what causes those differences.

Research on chief executives and personality has matured from impressionistic biography into a cumulative evidence base that draws on trait psychology, upper-echelons theory, organizational behavior, and strategic management. The strongest general conclusion is simple: CEOs are not psychologically random occupants of their role.

Relative to nonleaders and lower-level roles, the best-supported profile for attaining and sustaining top leadership is lower neuroticism (higher emotional stability), higher conscientiousness, higher extraversion, and moderately higher openness to experience. Agreeableness is the least consistent of the classic Big Five predictors — its value depends heavily on the criterion, context, and level of leadership examined. In the broad leadership literature, extraversion is the single most reliable positive correlate of leader emergence, with conscientiousness, openness, and emotional stability close behind.

Beyond the Big Five, several narrower CEO-specific traits are now well studied:

• Narcissism tends to be associated with bold, attention-grabbing strategic action — greater strategic dynamism, more "grandiose" strategy, and more acquisitions — but not with better average performance. Instead, it is more robustly linked to performance extremity and volatility. Narcissistic CEOs create more variance, not necessarily more value.
• Humility is associated with stronger collaboration in the top management team, lower CEO-to-team pay disparity, greater strategic ambidexterity, and better firm outcomes — one of the more credible pieces of evidence that a prosocial trait can improve performance through senior-team processes.
• Overconfidence has, on average, a positive association with firm performance, partly by encouraging strategic risk-taking — though this benefit is moderated by how much managerial discretion the leader has and by national culture.
• Language-based personality (estimated from how CEOs speak on earnings calls) shows substantial associations with firm culture — and those associations strengthen the longer a CEO stays in office, consistent with a slow imprinting effect.

Measuring CEO personality is hard

Before trusting any claim about "the CEO personality," it helps to understand how difficult these people are to measure. Self-report inventories are the cleanest psychometric method, but CEOs are scarce, busy, image-conscious, and often shielded by boards and investor-relations systems, so clean self-reports are rare.

As a result, CEO studies rely on a patchwork of methods: direct inventories (like the Big Five NEO-PI-R or the HEXACO model) when leaders participate; informant or subordinate ratings; unobtrusive archival proxies (narcissism indices built from photo prominence, compensation gaps, pronoun use, media visibility, even signature size); computational language analysis of earnings calls; and historiometric expert coding. Reviews of this field have shown that conclusions often depend on which method was used — self-report, third-party, and unobtrusive measures do not yield interchangeable results.

This matters because some widely used unobtrusive indicators may capture social position, celebrity, or communication style as much as the underlying trait. The honest synthesis is one of probabilistic tendencies, not rigid personality "types."

What the big meta-analyses show

The general leadership literature provides the strongest statistical foundation for understanding what kinds of personalities reach the top. The table below summarizes the landmark studies.

Two takeaways emerge from placing the best-established estimates on one scale. First, the broad "bright-side" traits have larger and more stable relationships with leadership than any single narrower trait. Second, traits like narcissism matter far more for emergence — getting the role — than for effectiveness — doing it well.

CEOs compared with managers and employees

How different are CEOs, really, from the people below them? High-quality head-to-head comparisons are rarer than you'd expect — most research compares leaders with nonleaders, or studies promotion over time, rather than lining CEOs up directly against employees. Still, several robust gradients emerge.

The clearest is the broad-trait leadership profile. Relative to lower-hierarchy roles, managerial and executive positions are associated with lower neuroticism and higher conscientiousness, and often with higher extraversion and openness. One of the cleanest CEO-versus-staff studies (Palaiou & Furnham, 2014) compared 138 CEOs against a working-population norm and found CEOs significantly less neurotic and more conscientious, with meaningful effect sizes, plus somewhat higher extraversion.

A large UK population study that placed employees, supervisors, managers, and entrepreneurs in the same dataset found a consistent pattern: managers showed lower neuroticism, higher conscientiousness, higher openness, and higher extraversion than employees — a reliably more agentic, more emotionally stable profile as you move up. Longitudinal promotion research reinforces the direction of causation: employees who are lower in neuroticism and higher in conscientiousness are more likely to be promoted later, which means these traits are operating before a person ever occupies a senior role.

The most defensible summary is narrower than the headlines suggest. It is not that "CEOs are uniquely narcissistic" or "radically unlike everyone else." Darker traits become consequential at the top not because CEOs are uniformly dark, but because the scale and discretion of the role magnify whatever traits are present.

Selection, socialization, and why context rules

Does personality make people into CEOs, or does becoming a CEO change how personality is expressed? The best evidence supports both — but it is stronger for selection than for socialization. Promotion studies show that traits predict advancement before the role is ever held. At the same time, the finding that CEO personality shapes firm culture more strongly the longer a CEO stays in office is hard to explain by selection alone; it points to an accumulating imprint.

Crucially, the same trait can look useful in one context and costly in another. Leadership roles are unusually high in visibility, ambiguity, and discretion. Extraversion helps because the role demands public communication and coalition-building. Conscientiousness helps because CEOs coordinate high-stakes activity over long horizons. Emotional stability helps because the role is evaluatively intense. Openness matters most when strategic adaptation is central. But these tendencies only translate into results when the environment lets them — traits shape behavior, and behavior shapes outcomes.

Several moderators reliably change the equation:

• Industry. The strongest CEO evidence tends to come from high-discretion, high-visibility sectors like technology — not regulated utilities or slow-growth family firms.
• National culture. Overconfidence and agentic traits pay off more in cultures high in assertiveness and performance-orientation and lower in power distance.
• Tenure. Some traits help you win the role quickly, while others matter more for what you build slowly.
• Gender. An underexplored area, with the small existing evidence base suggesting role-congruity pressures can change how the same trait is expressed and evaluated.

Performance consequences — and a caution

Because these traits operate so conditionally, asking whether a given trait is simply "good" or "bad" for CEOs is usually the wrong question. The better question is: good or bad for what outcome, in what context, and at what level of the trait? Narcissism tends to amplify variance — bolder moves, more extreme and fluctuating results. Overconfidence tends to lift average performance through risk-taking, within limits. Humility tends to be less flashy but more integrative, improving coordination through the top team. Different profiles shape how a firm performs, not just whether it performs.

How to read this research

The evidence is rigorous in some areas and fragile in others. Its strengths include several high-quality meta-analyses, large-sample datasets, and genuine methodological creativity in measuring hard-to-reach elite leaders. Its weaknesses are real too: heavy dependence on U.S. publicly listed firms, male-dominated CEO samples, mostly cross-sectional designs, noisy archival proxies, and inconsistent ways of defining the same construct.

Those limitations are exactly why the most defensible conclusion is about probabilistic tendencies rather than fixed types. On average, CEOs are more emotionally stable, more conscientious, more extraverted, and more agentic than lower-level employees — and, as our own data adds, more power-driven and more likely to lead as Pragmatists. But CEOs are also highly heterogeneous.

Key takeaways

• Executives are 97% more likely to be power-driven than everyone else (11.5% vs. 5.8%), and the power motive rises at every level of the hierarchy.
• Executives are 60% more likely to lead as Pragmatists than other leaders combined (9.8% vs. 6.1%) — a driven, competitive, goal-first style that is otherwise the rarest of the four.
• Both findings point to the same agentic profile: a strong pull toward taking charge (Power) paired with a results-first way of leading (Pragmatist).
• The broad research agrees: CEOs cluster toward higher extraversion, conscientiousness, openness, and emotional stability, sitting at the top of a selection funnel that rewards these traits.
• Personality predicts emergence more than effectiveness. The traits that help people win power are not always the ones that help them wield it well.
• Context is decisive. Industry, culture, discretion, and tenure all shape whether a given trait becomes a strength or a liability — so treat this as tendencies, not destiny.