George Banks, Ph.D., is a professor of Management and department chair at UNC Charlotte. He is the incoming Editor-in-Chief at The Leadership Quarterly. His research interests focus on leadership and inclusion, ethics, and research methods and statistics. His work has received several recognitions and awards, and in 2022 he received the Charlotte Business Journal's 40 under 40 award.
Articles by Dr. George Banks
Resources Mentioned in This Episode
A Quote From This Episode
About The International Leadership Association (ILA)
My Approach to Hosting
Connect with Scott Allen
George Banks, Ph.D., is a professor of Management and department chair at UNC Charlotte. He is the incoming Editor-in-Chief at The Leadership Quarterly. His research interests focus on leadership and inclusion, ethics, and research methods and statistics. His work has received several recognitions and awards, and in 2022 he received the Charlotte Business Journal's 40 under 40 award.
Articles by Dr. George Banks
Resources Mentioned in This Episode
A Quote From This Episode
About The International Leadership Association (ILA)
My Approach to Hosting
Connect with Scott Allen
Note: Voice-to-text transcriptions are about 90% accurate, and conversations-to-text do not always translate perfectly. I include it to provide you with the spirit of the conversation.
Scott Allen 0:00
Okay, everybody, welcome to the Phronesis podcast. Thank you so much for checking in wherever you are in the world. Today. I'm super excited. We have Dr. George Banks and he is a professor of management and he's the department chair at UNC Charlotte. He is the incoming editor in chief at the leadership quarterly. His research interests focus on leadership and inclusion ethics research methods and statistics. His work has received several recognitions and awards and in 2022, he was the recipient of the Charlotte Business Journal's 40 under 40 award. Now, George, there's a lot more here. I was probably the most humble bio I have ever received. You know, not only were you department chair, but you decided to go ahead and take on editor of Leadership Quarterly, the premier journal for the topic of leadership in the world. George, thank you so much for being here today. What blanks do you need to fill in what other color and texture can you add? So that listeners know a little bit more about you, sir?
George Banks 1:02
First off, Scott, thanks for having me on the podcast. I'm excited to be here. I am a professor at UNC Charlotte, like you said, originally from Washington, DC grew up in the Virginia area, did an undergraduate degree in psychology, a government master's degree in industrial organizational psychology, Ph.D. in management from Virginia Commonwealth University, and while I was finishing up my Ph.D., and my wife was getting her Ph.D. in microbiology at the University of Virginia. So we're here together in Charlotte, got two wonderful little kids. So I do have a life outside of academics that helps to keep me balanced, right, because we all love our jobs. But it's good to have a life outside of work.
Scott Allen 1:43
Oh, that's great. And you know what I am discovering that parenting is its own wonderful, wonderful practice field for engaging in influence.
George Banks 1:53
Yes, practicing learning about leadership. Five-year-olds can be leaders.
Scott Allen 2:02
Well, it's amazing. I mean, I used to watch my daughter, jump onto the playground. I have twin girls, and especially one of them would jump onto the playground and just start gathering other children to do what to do right. And so much fun.
George Banks 2:20
Well, and so ever. Do they ever team up against you? Oh,
Scott Allen 2:24
yes, for sure. Yes, yes. Yes. Yes. You know, it's so much fun, though. It really is. As we transition from kind of the younger years to the teen years, I've been doing, I've been trying to do a lot of learning. There's a woman named Lisa Damour, who wrote about raising young girls. And so I've been learning about that. And I went to a session at my son's school about teenage boys. I mean, it's just it's fascinating because more and more, I kind of observed myself failing. And in some cases, it's hard and I'm seeing it, sometimes I don't see it in real-time, I look over at my wife and she tells me nonverbally you're failing. Right, you know, it's an adventure, it really is. Sometimes I'll say, you know, about, about 14 years ago, I entered a simulation 24/7 365 simulations to test and develop my emotional intelligence. And it's working it is but I keep entering new phases of a challenge. So it's good. It's all good.
George Banks 3:37
Every chapter has something new for us.
Scott Allen 3:39
It doesn't it right. I mean, it's just so interesting, this whole process. And, you know, I want to jump into how you discovered kind of your passion for what it is that you are writing about. I mean, you are so prolific, your writing on so many different topics. How did you tap into this passion? When did you first understand that you had a lot of energy for some of these topics?
George Banks 4:06
I've always loved research, very intrinsically motivated by that, you know, certainly as an academic, there's a lot of extrinsic factors that can motivate you. But I've always been intrinsically motivated by it, almost just a research addiction in some ways, right? You know, I think a lot of people maybe are like that, where, you know, you're very good at starting projects, but it's a lot harder to finish. And especially as a Ph.D. student, you are encouraged to try things out, you know, obviously, people want you to develop areas of expertise. I've always struggled with that in some ways because I just say yes to everything. I do think I've grown from it because you learn so much from using qualitative methods, quantitative methods, data science, you know, psychometrics econometrics, learning, and dabbling in different content areas. And through all that, it's almost like it's the matrix right? And you start to kind of see the zeros and ones and it makes a better scholar because you're so much better rounded, which is a little bit contrary to the advice we get, which is to kind of pick a research stream, or to really quickly double down on it, and really invest everything you've got in it. And I do think, obviously, there's merit to that, you know, becoming an expert in an area and becoming recognized for it. But there's also a disadvantage. And I also think there are only two to three really interesting questions at a time and a research stream or a literature area. And so if you're entirely invested in one literature area, you know, there's only so much you can really produce that's meaningful, I think,
Scott Allen 5:35
well, you know, as I've engaged in this project of the podcast, I think I've recorded probably around 160 episodes, as we've as we're having this conversation. And what's so much fun about that is that I might be in a conversation one week with a scholar about the transfer of training. And that's what he's been studying for 30 years, right? That's his area of expertise. And the next week, I'm in a conversation around adult development. And another week, I'm talking about adult learning theory. And just, it's so broad, and that's what I really, really respect about the landscape of your CV, I've never seen anything like it. I mean, just
George Banks 6:15
Myy CV approach is not to be encouraged to a lot of people, right? Because you certainly get in trouble for it at times when people see you all over the place. And they say, what's your story? Right?
Scott Allen 6:25
Yeah. But your story, your story? I mean, what's so interesting about it, though, George, is that I mean, when you're writing is many, I don't know, has anyone ever written as many meta-analyses as you can on different topics? I mean, it's so but think about that. I mean, from a learning perspective, you're going so deep into some of these areas and really building a breadth of knowledge. And to your point, I think that diversity of knowledge and that depth and breadth, it's just, it's powerful, I really do.
George Banks 7:02
Well, you learn a lot by you know, whether it's a meta-analytic review, or systematic review, or some other type of review, you learn a lot and become an expert very quickly by beginning by taking kind of a survey of the state of the literature. And then suddenly you have a unique insight into opportunities, gaps, and limitations within a literature area that then helps to guide you know, future primary study research. Yes, yes. And so let me also add, it's a reminder too, that your research is meant to be joining a conversation, and it kind of helps you to understand what's a meaningful way to advance this conversation.
Scott Allen 7:38
So well put, Kathy Lund Dean, I don't know if you know, Kathy, but she was the editor of the Journal of Management Education. And she would describe it as "merging into traffic." Well, can we go on a little bit of a tour of some of your work? I would love for listeners to understand that depth and breadth, just have a taste of it. And this isn't going to be in any particular order. But I just think it's just really, really a lot of fun. So let's, let's go to digital leadership right now, as you certainly that topic, what were a couple of things that kind of stood out for you? On the topic of digital leadership? How is the digital age transforming leadership? Is it?
George Banks 8:22
That's a great question, because, in a lot of ways, digital leadership, and can be defined in a lot of different ways. There's kind of different conceptualizations, you know, for people, you know, sometimes you're talking about virtual work, you know, where you're working, you know, through zoom, right? Or emails or you're doing some kind of hybrid format, using maybe simulation studies, virtual reality, data science, right, or wearable sensors. So there's, there's a lot of different things that can come to mind when you say digital leadership. But your question is, is meaningful, you know, in what ways it? Is it kind of similar, we're different than where we've always historically under understood leadership? And, you know, the answer is it's both right, it's in leadership is still leadership, social influence is still social influence. But in other ways, it's different, right? So the way we conceptualize a leader may be different, right? Because you have folks that are in informal roles, they don't have a title that says leader, right? You have these, for instance, social media influencers, right, that are having a great impact on people's thinking, their behavior, their thoughts, the behaviors they enact, but they're not, they're not the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. So there are certainly differences there. But in other ways, you know, there's still you know, a lot of what we've learned about leadership historically still holds true in this digital age in the digital age, you know, it's given us maybe more tools to understand that.
Scott Allen 9:45
Okay, well, you're right. I mean, it's so interesting; as I introduced the topic of leadership and class right now and I talk about influencing my students' minds, they go to influencers. That's literally how they kind of think about that word. Now, have you observed the same thing?
George Banks 10:02
Yes, yes, absolutely. We're, again, it's not necessarily always the CEO, right, or the governor president that's creating social influence; there's a lot that can be said for folks that are maybe in these kinds of historically overlooked positions that are now having an impact.
Scott Allen 10:20
I'm going to switch gears from that topic. And we're gonna go to some of your reworking and rethinking of transformational leadership behaviors. That's kind of fascinating. So, you know, obviously, a lot of this work, I guess it could be moved back to James McGregor burns, and then, of course, bass and bass and Avolio. And it proceeded, and there were different branches of some of this. But I hadn't seen as much obviously written about this topic in recent years. So you and some colleagues are going back and looking at these transformational leadership behaviors. What did you find there?
George Banks 10:55
Well, Scott, let me first start by asking you a question. So think of leadership. Think of organizational behavior as the field, right? Yep. Take a guess what percentage of variables are in this field. And in these research studies, what percentage do you think are behavioral in nature? Capture behavior? Give me a percentage.
Scott Allen 11:17
Very few. That's correct. 7%.
George Banks 11:23
That's good. That's close. We did; we did a review and found it was approximately 3%. Right now, there's, there are some moderating variables or contingency factors that are about 3% of all variables. And then our review, about 19% of studies had at least one behavioral variable. Now, this notion is not new people have complained for many years. Baumeister is one of the ones that come to mind first, for me, who's noted that we're not studying behavior, as much as perhaps we should. Now there are always benefits, I think, to understanding psychological mechanisms. But you know, if you have a field of organizational behavior or field of leadership, we want to know what leaders are doing. And, you know, a really great example would be to imagine you've got a leader, who's a man who displays righteous anger over an injustice, right? You might have a woman who displays the same behavior for the same reason but is perhaps evaluated differently because of societal expectations for how men and women should lead. Now, this is one of the fundamental problems with relying solely upon survey-based research where, you know, we study these leadership styles into transformational ethical, authentic, you name it, solely based on questionnaire data. And when you look at meta-analytic reviews on these topics, they're dominated 100%, almost exclusively by questionnaire survey measures. Yeah. And again, it's not that there's an inherent problem with these questionnaires; I use them myself. But if you want to study behavior, that's not the best way to do it. That's the best way to study people's evaluations of their behavior. And so this was something that's not unique to transformational leadership. But we took a deep dive into it to say, let's put behavior back into transformational leadership. And let's look at specific behaviors leaders enact that people who are familiar with transformational leadership might look at individualized consideration, right, what behaviors do leaders enact, that create feelings in our evaluations from followers that they've been considered? So we then experimentally manipulate these behaviors, and we show that they cause behavioral outcomes and followers. And then the next step is now to teach a machine-learning algorithm that can recognize these statements. For instance, in emails, they can take transcripts from zoom meetings and identify the behavior so that we can then provide leaders with more customized coaching and feedback for how well they did enact transformational leader behaviors and to show the benefits for followers in terms of their performance and well-being.
Scott Allen 13:57
I'm going to transition now to another stream of years; we've got virtual charismatic leadership and then the future of charismatic leadership. But what I would really love to know is how do you think about charismatic leadership differently than these transformational leadership behaviors are. What are the differences for you as you think about those two different concepts?
George Banks 14:18
That's great. So historically, there have been some concerns, you know, probably dating back at least a decade, if not longer, that there's redundancy between charisma and transformational leadership, and again, not unique to these topics. There's there have been concerns for years that there are, you know, as many definitions of leadership as they are folks that have studied it. You know you have things that will throw up people throughout, like empowering leadership, humble leadership, servant leadership, and people will say, well, what's the difference? Right? Yep. So this is not unique to charisma or transformational. And in fact, when you look when you start studying specific behaviors, you can see instances where you're like, okay, that that looks redundant, or maybe there's overlap, but it's meaningful. Right. So if you were to think about transformational leadership, one way that you might enact a behavior to develop followers is to teach some kind of life lesson, right? Well, how do you do that you might tell a story, you might share an anecdote, or you might use a contrast where you present two different perspectives. That is also has been studied as a charismatic leadership tactic. So it could potentially be both, right? Similarly, you might look at ethical leadership where you're signaling values; you might use a rhetorical question, which is also a charismatic leadership tactic to signal a value about a moral. So you, you have, in these instances, behaviors that can be classified as charismatic, transformational, and ethical. And in fact, this is a way that people experience leaders, right? Because you're not going to get typecast. It's just a charismatic, and I'm typecast as an ethical, and that's it, you know, you don't do anything, don't do anything about it. Right. That's not the way it works. Yeah. And so this is also a way that data science then comes into play, because instead of administering these questionnaires, where you've got the maybe MLQ, for transformational or the ELS, or for ethical, right, and you have these scales, and the way we'd maybe try to study them simultaneously, historical, historically, is to give a questionnaire with 100 items and have all these leadership styles built into it. But now we can teach machine learning algorithms to record, for instance, a Zoom meeting and to capture the enactment of these different behaviors simultaneously. So we can say, Okay, this is kind of almost a profile of this leader. And you can see to what extent they're enacting behaviors that are charismatic, ethical, and destructive, for instance, because destructive is another one that's potentially subjective, right? So behavior may be considered developmental at one point and helpful. And it's curvilinear, up to a certain point, and that becomes destructive, right? So we need to use these new tools that are available to us to better reflect the way in which people experience leaders.
Scott Allen 16:59
It's great. So what do you think about virtual charismatic leadership, the future of charismatic leadership? What are some things on your mind? I mean, obviously, using these tools, right, we've got artificial intelligence machine learning, we've got some new technologies that can be enacted. How else do you think about specifically charismatic, either virtually or just the future of so
George Banks 17:23
what's what's virtual? One of the big questions we have as scholars is how can we ensure that leaders are as effective virtually as they are in person, right; we saw during the COVID, 19 pandemic, when all work was shifted, online, leaders were trying to have positive social influence for their followers, whether it's their email videos, virtual meetings, phone calls, you name it, and, you know, now post-pandemic or as we transition on to whatever the future holds for us, you know, we're hopefully going to have a bit more of a balance where there's some in person, some virtual, and one of the things we want to do with charisma is, you know, say how can we create this positive social influence? Whether this is in person or virtually, you know, do these behaviors that leaders enact to kind of inspire and motivate their followers, so they work equally well, virtually, and there's probably some contingencies here, right? curvilinear effects where up to a certain point of behavior might be effective, maybe then after that there's diminishing returns, you know, we're continuing to do research on leadership and gender, to understand the extent to which certain behaviors work well for men, but maybe not women in terms of leader emergence or leader effectiveness. Because we need the answers to these questions. Because we have a gender issue in terms of leader leadership roles, and this is historical, we've kind of plateaued, and we need to break off this plateau. Studying behaviors is, I think, the key to that studying effective behaviors that work regardless of your demographic background is critical to that. And so we need to kind of understand, okay, you know, these behaviors experimentally, or from a data science perspective, appear to work well, regardless of your demographic background, or gender, for instance. Or we may find that there's bias, we may find that men tend to enact a specific behavior more than women, or when they enact the same behavior, they are evaluated differently than another demographic group, right? And we need these answers to these questions so that we can improve our training and development.
Scott Allen 19:21
Okay, transitioning ethical leadership. For listeners, I want you to; I'm going to put a link to the Google Scholar page of Dr. Banks. I mean, it's really impressive. It's so cool, and the command of these different areas of research. It's inspiring, it really is, sir, it really is. When you think about ethical leadership right now, what are some things that are top of mind? Are questions still for you in that realm?
George Banks 19:51
What specific behaviors can we teach leaders? You know, there's been a lot of research again on ethical leadership survey-based causal, and inferences are sketchy, we can see that there's a correlation between your My leader, we can see that I evaluate you as ethical. And we can see that that's correlated with my job satisfaction, right? Now, causal inferences, again, are a bit challenging there. But what we really want to know is what behaviors is Scott enacting that cause me to evaluate him as ethical and that we can demonstrate to stakeholders actually produce beneficial outcomes, right? So we had a conceptual paper on this. We completed a qualitative study where we created a taxonomy of specific ethical leader behaviors; we showed that these behaviors cause someone to evaluate you as ethical, and we showed that they cause an increase in task performance. So we did a study where we hired participants to write thank you letters to frontline workers who worked during the pandemic, right when it was, you know, things were locked down. But some people still had to get up and go to work so that the world could keep functioning. The participants wrote a thank you letter so that we showed that the ethical leadership speeches caused increases and task performance there; we also conducted a study that involved financial theft; we gave people a chance to steal money from us, and we showed that the ethical leadership speeches, this is pretty fun, right? This is kind of humorous to say that you're allowing people to steal money, but we show that the ethical leadership speeches caused a reduction in financial theft. And then, so you kind of have the proof of concept there. But we also want to make it easy for other people to study ethical leadership behaviors. So we created a machine learning algorithm that could automatically score these ethical signals in the text so that future scholars could use this to study emails, CEO letters to shareholders, meeting transcripts, etc. So that you have that causal evidence, you have specific behaviors that you can teach your MBA students, for instance, but then you also have an easier tool to use to study ethical leadership.
Scott Allen 21:55
So a theme I'm hearing in really a lot of your answers is behaviors. Are we truly studying behaviors? And then, are we leveraging technology to help us do some of this research in new and unique ways? Would that be capturing some of this?
George Banks 22:11
Yes. And I will add that I have a real interest in research that promotes inclusion, especially from a leadership perspective. And I think one of the reasons why we haven't made more gains in this area is because we're not studying behaviors, right? So again, if you're a good leader, we don't know, looking at the literature, very specifically, what behaviors you enacted that caused that. So again, imagine we're in a Zoom meeting, and I get cut off; you might say, Hey, George, I know she didn't get a chance to finish your thought; I'd love for you to tell me a bit more about your ideas, right, and see how that creates a feeling of inclusion in what might be an in-person meeting or virtual meeting. And so we want to be able to pinpoint these behaviors that leaders can do very specifically so that we can teach it to leaders which can help them emerge but can also help them to be effective as leaders once they get there into those leadership roles. I love it. Well,
Scott Allen 23:09
The last one I'd love to touch on is Justin. And we've never talked about this topic on the podcast. But what are we learning about the dark triad? And maybe define that for for listeners, but then what are some observations in that space? fascinating topic?
George Banks 23:25
Yeah, I'm happy you brought that up. So this is a topic that's been around for a while, right? So we have our Big Five personality traits, you know, which are, I think, well known. You have conscientiousness, emotional stability, openness to experience, agreeableness, and extraversion. But there's this notion that these are very positively balanced personality traits, and stable individual differences. And there's always with personality research, and you're debating it, are we missing something that's meaningful? So the dark triad looks at narcissism looks at Machiavellianism, which is essentially looking at manipulative behavior. And then you have psychopathy, so you have a lack of kind of feelings or emotions, almost Stoeckle to a fault. There's been a lot of primary study research on this; we've done several meta-analytic reviews on it. It's to the point that now we're working on basically a second-order meta, so it's like a meta of metas. We're introducing some new contingency factors. So you know, using best practices in open science, right, to see, you know, to do traditional results hold up and trying to understand the full extent of these personality traits. And one of the things that's interesting about the dark triad is people have long talked about their points in time that these are good, right? Yeah, because you naturally see these, and you're like, Well, I don't score high on these right, and, you know, their continuum. So we all score somewhere on narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. You know, hopefully, we score on the lower end of it, but we score on it, but there is an interesting kind of idea. And so this kind of relates back to Leadership and destructive leadership. You know, when do people enact some of these more inappropriate behaviors the times that, as a leader that you are tempted for whatever reason to be manipulative or be separated from your emotions in some ways, and the ways in which people have talked about this being good, you know, imagine being the manipulative CEO, you might negotiate for a better deal for your firm. So you're benefiting your in-group at the expense of an out-group, or psychopathy, maybe you've got to lay somebody off, and the tough job, someone's got to do it, and you're disconnected from your emotions that make you better at it, or narcissism, perhaps you're in again, a tough job, but you get a lot of criticism, which a lot of leaders aren't critiqued quite a bit. And so being a little bit self-focused to a fault might kind of buffer you emotionally from some of these critiques. Now, the counterargument to all this is that over the course of time, you know, in terms of social exchange relationships, these things are bad, you know, to score high on it, right? If you're manipulating people consistently, people are gonna not want to work with you, do business with you have relationships with you. The same thing for psychopathy, the same thing for narcissism, over time, these, on average, are bad traits to score high on. But it is interesting to understand what some of these implications are for how we select leaders, how we develop leaders; this relates to a really cool paper on hubris that was published in leadership quarterly, I think it was last year, you know, where they looked at how appointed leaders have some kind of arrogance associated with it, because they're like, entitled, almost, I earned this, I deserve it. Now I'm in charge, and I'm the boss, right? As opposed to other techniques of leadership selection, where you might have a pool of qualified individuals that are then one is randomly selected, and how this might reduce this kind of hubris or entitlement effect. Because, you know, you recognize that you're competent, you know, you've worked hard, but there's less entitlement because of the way the selection was made.
Scott Allen 26:58
Well, you mentioned L. Q. So let's go there. You've just, in recent months, taking over as editor-in-chief, or have you actually officially taken over now, George,
George Banks 27:07
I take over January one, but we've begun the transition phase in terms of putting together the team working on editorial policy, you know, kind of the behind-the-scenes in terms of operating the system, so that, you know, anytime you have a transition like that you want things to be smooth and not Russia, I've we've begun.
Scott Allen 27:27
That's great. That's great. So would you talk a little bit about some of your vision for the journal? What's exciting for you as you think about this opportunity?
George Banks 27:35
Sure. So when Antonakis came in about six years ago, he did a lot of heavy lifting in terms of creating the foundation that we have today, in terms of putting emphasis on strong causal inferences, helping to improve the methodological rigor of the journal, and also the field. And then also starting the process of enacting open science practices, which is really important not just for having a robust science that replicates and can be reproduced, but also has benefits for collaboration, and exchanging of resources and materials. He also did a great job starting to grow the field in terms of recognizing that, hey, it's not just management and applied psychology that can contribute to this, but there are benefits to biology, sociology, economics, political science, education, you know, all these fields are encouraged and welcome to Study leadership. And so, you know, all those things, I certainly want to continue the emphasis on methodological rigor, causal inferences, I want to increase the global presence of L. Q, kind of doesn't sit well with me that the majority of leadership to date is conducted in the United States and Western Europe, right? Certainly, there are leaders in South America, Africa, Asia, you know, other parts of the world. And we need to study that. So I want to see, you know, as I said, continue to grow some of these things like the distance, the disciplinary diversity, right, I think is important, but the inner international presence is important as well. I really want to push the Open Science element as well to encourage greater sharing of data analytic code resources for various stakeholders, I think that this is really important. Publishing models, you know, we introduced the registered report model. There are other kinds of futuristic, it feels like approaches that we've seen other fields use that, you know, I'd love to, I mean, this is, this would take a lot of work, but I'll just give it to you because it's fun.
Scott Allen 29:35
Yeah, I feel like we're gonna geek out here. This is fun. I love it. What do you so
George Banks 29:40
imagine you have a great research idea, right? It's a good one, right? You write up an introduction section right outlining the idea or contribution to theory or practice. You outlined the methodology section, right? That's what you do. And you submit it to L Q. We then have it reviewed as a register should report if it's a good idea, or let me say first, if it's a bad idea, you get a rejection. Right? Yeah, you know, there's a methodological flaw that can't be fixed, or there's no merit to the research question for whatever reason; you, Scott are benefited by the fact that you did not conduct that study yet. Right, which had this fundamental flaw, you got some initial feedback, you can go back to the drawing board rework it, right, workshop it a bit, you know, that kind of thing, reviewers, it's not too taxing, right, because you're just reviewing the intro and Methods section. But now, let's do the reverse. Let's imagine you had a good idea, right? We like it; we're gonna give you after revision, perhaps. And and "in principle acceptance," which means that you're going to get to publish this study, regardless of the outcome, whether it's statistically significant or not. For instance, you're going to get to publish this. And this is very meaningful. So, for instance, I study leadership and gender effects. So imagine you find a gender effect, right? That's meaningful. Imagine that you find no gender effect; that's also meaningful, you know, we need all that information. But now, this is my favorite part. Imagine that we've partnered with a funding agency, right? I'll just use it throughout some of the big examples, National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense; imagine we've partnered with them; you not only get the in-principle acceptance for your submission, which means you're going to get an article. But now you're also going to get; we'll say, a $500,000 grant to go out and execute the work, right? Wow, it's a win win win, because you now have gotten a publication and a grant for a good idea. You know you have to; you have to work hard now to deliver, and the journal gets to commission some really great research. Yeah, it's more fun to review an idea where you can kind of help the author co-create or craft their idea. And then the funding agency, it's a win because you want to fund high-quality research that's going to get published in a good journal with good visibility and have implications for theory and practice. And you've got the best reviewers in the world and a great Associate Editor to help the authors to guide and navigate on this journey. So it's truly the future where you see the benefits of coming together. And these ideas, and let me go a little bit further, Scott. Yeah. Now imagine your idea.
Scott Allen 32:10
I don't know, George, how is this gonna get any better?
George Banks 32:14
Imagine if your idea is to do a large-scale collaborative project, right? So it's not just going to be Scott sitting around at his desk doing your research, I imagine Scott's going to invite a network of leadership scholars, and we're going to do research with 1020 people, something we couldn't do on our own right, to really make a meaningful large scale advancement for the literature. Now, I jokingly say that this is, you know, the future. But we have already begun this. So you mentioned virtual charismatic leadership, which was funded in part through a grant from Society for Industrial Organizational Psychology (SIOP), is an international collaboration; we have a grant now from the Army Research Institute for a prospective meta-analysis. So not a retrospective where everyone kind of works on their own, and you're trying to find these articles and hope that you can analyze them together. But a prospective meta, so we had a workshop in September, where a bunch of leading scholars from around the US came. And we developed an idea for a project; this was supported by, again, the army, and we're going to create this, create this project proposal submitted as a registered report where we get feedback, right? So it's not quite the process I just described, where you get the "in-principle acceptance" and then the grant this time, it happened a bit in reverse, but you can see the benefits to the authors, the journal, the funding agency, and the field as you start to produce this collaborative research.
Scott Allen 33:38
Yeah, oh, that's just incredible. It's elegant, and it's beautiful. It's meaningful. I mean, there's so many wins baked into it, I mean, you're not wasting the time of reviewers, you're not waste. I mean, there are just other like 12 wins in that.
George Banks 33:54
It accelerates science, right? In a typical meta-analysis, you've got to wait ten years for enough research to emerge that you can better analyze that data set now here, in the careers Manuel uses. As an example, again, we did the traditional retrospective meta-analysis that was published in 2017. And, of course, like most med analysts, we came up with a list of things we wished the primary study authors had done and hope that people will listen to us in the future is that 10 or 20 years from now? There's enough data to analyze to answer these questions. And we said You know what, let's just go and do it ourselves now, right? Why wait? And so that's when we did the "prospective" meta-analysis. And so you know, we were doing some others on authorship right now. And then folks in other fields have been doing this for a while. So again, it's not unique to have large scales of researchers come together and work together on something.
Scott Allen 34:50
Well, George, I can't thank you enough for your time today. We should probably start to wind down just a couple of things. So and some of these I'm repeating, I Very much appreciate, obviously, your command of the methods and statistics and the technology. But then I just have such a great appreciation for your willingness to, to your point in some ways, buck the trend a little bit, and approach this work differently. Because I think we need that, I think we know where the norms of behavior when it comes to how a scholar exists in higher education. We know where that gets us. And here we are. And you are thinking from a creative and innovative standpoint about how we do some of this better, how we accelerate some of this work, how we do better work, and I just have a great appreciation, I just have a lot of respect, I really, really do.
George Banks 35:49
Well, thank you, Scott. But let me also add that, you know, the work that I do has been so inspired by so many different scholars, and it's really a nice time to be a leadership scholar right now. Because there's just such community, there's just so much support exchanging ideas, you know, it feels like a really collegial, fun, safe space to do this research. So, you know, I've learned so much from folks before me and folks that I work with, you know, even Ph.D. students, right, you learn from those collaborations?
Scott Allen 36:17
Sure. Well, as, as we close out for the day, what have you been streaming? What have you been watching? What have you been listening to? What have you been reading what's caught your eye in recent times? You know, it might have something to do with what we just discussed, it may have nothing to do with what we've just discussed, but what caught your attention that listeners might be interested in?
George Banks 36:36
That's a good question. You know, and, you know, as you're, you're phrasing it to me, you know, I'm trying to think about some of the stuff that currently listening to you versus some things that I've listened to or read recently, and I'm gonna go with, with one that's relatively recent. So this was just published in 2019. It's a book I; I'm a big audible fan, and I don't work for Audible, not advertising, or that. You know, it's a nice way to squeeze in some reading that does not include journal articles. Right? There's, there's one - let me read the full title to you because I think there's some other short or material out there, right? It related to it. It's Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. And the author is Caroline Criado Perez is the last name there. And this book just blew my mind. Because, you know, you hear about gender bias and gender discrimination, you know, in different areas, but they start the other author breaks. And if you get the audible book, she narrates it herself, which is, which is even better, right? Yes, yeah. But you start realizing. And one thing I love about this, as a scientist, is that it's very evidence-based, right? So she doesn't just say there's bias or discrimination here. There. She's citing really specific examples, and it blows your mind. And it covers everything from the way in which snow, like when it snows, the way in which people determine city planners' design and decide where to plow first, right? And if you think about things like minimizing injuries and accidents and where people need to go, so covers everything from that to the organizational science space and the way in which jobs are designed to set people up for success. And it, I like it, because she also covers a lot of kind of practical takeaways for folks that you're like, well, I could enact that today at my job. And it's one of the things I also love to highlight, right? It talks about bias against bias that creates challenges for women in the workplace. But there are a lot of implications for men, to which a lot of times you talk about gender equality in the workplace. You know, there tends to be a focus on, Well, what can women do? Or what do we need to do to help women but really, it's not a us versus them kind of story? It's how can we all work together to make the workplace better, and so a lot of her recommendations aren't just helpful for women, they're helpful for men to make their lives better as well, like together, and so that's one of the positive messages I love from the book.
Scott Allen 39:12
Interesting. I will put that in the show notes for sure. And I, too, I love it when it's the author who's reading I just listened to Lisa Feldman Barrett, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. And oh my gosh, right. I mean, I love hearing the authors share their work right. Listen to have you ever listened to Ray Dalio?
George Banks 39:32
George. Gosh, that name sounds so familiar.
Scott Allen 39:34
Okay, so you want a book that's going to kind of it's a little bit like Harari, with 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Just this kind of, you know, 50,000 feet, but Dalio has a book called Principles for Dealing With the Changing World Order. And it is just a fascinating listen if you get an opportunity. He is he's going to a number of bodies of literature; he's he founded a firm called Bridgewater. And he's a historian, and he loves economics, and he loves investing. And he's very interested in, you know, what is it that caused the Dutch to rise and then fall and the British to rise and fall? And then we and where are we in comparison to China and, but he's looking at it he has these 18 principles that he kind of looks at, to indicate success or, or, or concern. And it's just a really interesting, it's, but I love listening to him. He actually switches, you know, readers, like "Ray, come back! I like do you!" Well, George, I'm so thankful for your time today. And again, thank you for the work that you're doing. It's oftentimes a thankless service, serving in these roles because it's a heavy lift and it's a lot of work. But I hope listeners believe at this point that we are in very, very good hands. And there's a bright future. I loved hearing about your optimism about where we are. And then it's a fun time to be a scholar. And it's a fun time to be doing this work with some of the individuals in the field. It's exciting. It really is. And I think so much of what you discussed will help catapult our work forward much more quickly than maybe it has in the past. So thank you.
George Banks 41:27
Thank you, Scott, for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity to be the podcast.
Scott Allen 41:32
We'd love to have you back. We'll be in touch. Absolutely. Okay. Bye bye.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai