Cognitive Resources and Leadership Performance: What About the Task Requirements?

Fred E. Fiedler made an important contribution in summarising and discussing the tricky relationships between test-intelligence, time in service, and perceived experience on the one side, and rated leadership performance on the other. Two strings of results seem to be of importance for improving our knowledge on these relationships: (1) test-intelligence correlates with rated performance especially in the case of low perceived stress, and experience especially in the case of high stress; (2) test-intelligence correlates with rated performance if the other resource, perceived experience, is low. Both strings of results may fit with our expectations. Nevertheless, some aspects of the problem might trouble some readers, for reasons that Fiedler is not responsible for. There seem to be at least three clusters of unfulfilled wishes within this topic of research: selection and operationalisation of variables; design; and task requirements and intelligence.