An unwritten law of leadership states the loudest voices in the room are not always the wisest. Some of history’s most notable and successful leaders were known introverts who wrangled loads of information for sizable teams: Abraham Lincoln, Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey, to name a few. New research from the University of Delaware found introverted leaders who rely on intuition to handle this large bundle of information lead the most successful teams.
The research, co-authored by professor Dustin Sleesman, explored the concept of intuition and when it's helpful for leaders who are in charge of large teams. Sleesman and his co-authors from Michigan State University studied more than 3,000 U.S. Air Force captains at a military base in Alabama. As part of their leadership training, the captains participated in a team-based battlefield simulation, which gave the researchers an opportunity to observe and analyze their behavior.
Sleesman and his co-authors accurately predicted that teams performed better when their leaders were armed with high amounts of information. But they made two interesting findings they didn't expect:
• Introverted leaders led more successful teams when intuitively handling large amounts of information.
• Intuitive leaders, in general, led more successful teams when they had to handle a lot of information.
"Introverted people tend to be more reflective, more introspective, they tend to be more observational than extroverted leaders," Sleesman said. "So pairing intuition with introversion tended to be very effective for team performance."
Sleesman, an associate professor of management in UD's Lerner College of Business & Economics, studies the psychology of decision-making, negotiation and conflict resolution, as well as team effectiveness. To set up an interview, click on the link below.
Is Black Friday still a thing? Online sales have been outpacing brick-and-mortar sales for years, resulting in shorter lines and less of a frenzy at stores on the day after Thanksgiving. Many stores have also gone online with deals to compliment in-person shopping. University of Delaware experts can comment on this and other topics related to the holiday shopping season and gift-buying behavior.
Andong Cheng: Can provide tips on what to prepare for during this unique holiday shopping season. Her research focuses on defining and identifying the picky consumer segment, and explores how pickiness impacts other judgments and decisions. She advises consumers to consider the phenomenon of double mental discounting, where shoppers experience a “mental accounting phenomenon” when offered promotional credit.
Jackie Silverman: Research examines several facets of judgment and decision making and consumer psychology. According to Silverman, there are many potential benefits of online shopping for consumers, including some unconventional approaches to gift giving this season.
Philip Gable: Can talk about the science behind the art of gift-giving that goes beyond the material exchange — emotional nuances that also can be applied to charitable work and philanthropy. He says that significance contributes to the happiness we experience in gift-giving.
Matthew McGranaghan: Studies the economics of consumer attention and the indirect effects of marketing interventions. He explains that there is a difference in how businesses are innovating and utilizing online retail methods to connect with consumers this holiday season.
Bintong Chen: Can discuss the systematic nature of supply chain issues. He recommends shoppers use major retailers like Amazon and Walmart, whose companies use their own shipping fleets to minimize disruptions.
Caroline Swift: Examines supply chain transparency and the interactions between regulation and business performance.
Too often, people learn they have Alzheimer’s disease when it’s too late. The changes in the brain that lead to the disease manifesting with symptoms have already been occurring for decades.
Researchers at the University of Delaware will attempt to detect the disease sooner through a new study that examines changes in the arteries and brain tissue in midlife adults in their 50s and 60s. The findings of this work, funded by a nearly $4 million grant from the National Institute on Aging (NIA), could identify the earliest mechanisms linking vascular aging to the loss of brain tissue integrity, leading to new targets for interventions aimed at preventing age-related cognitive impairment.
“People who develop high blood pressure or stiffening of the aorta and carotid arteries in midlife are at a much higher risk for developing cognitive impairment or dementia in late life,” said Christopher Martens, the principal investigator of the study.
Martens, an associate professor of kinesiology and applied physiology in UD's College of Health Sciences and director of the Delaware Center for Cognitive Aging (DECCAR), is working closely with Curtis Johnson, an associate professor of biomedical engineering in the College of Engineering and leader of the neuroimaging biomarker core within DECCAR, on research funded by a nearly $4 million grant from the National Institute on Aging (NIA), a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
“A lot happens as we age, so we’re aiming to pinpoint the timing and exact mechanisms that cause these changes in midlife adults,” Martens said.
This latest grant extends DECCAR’s ongoing Delaware Longitudinal Study for Alzheimer’s Prevention (DeLSAP), which seeks to study how risk and protective factors for dementia are related and change over time. Those eligible for DeLSAP could also meet the criteria for participating in the new study.
In his Neurovascular Aging Laboratory, Martens studies mechanisms leading to the stiffening of arteries, while Johnson is specifically interested in measuring the stiffness of the brain.
“As a person ages, the brain gets softer and breaks down, and we’re looking to see whether changes in arterial stiffness and patterns of blood flow in the brain cause this decline,” Johnson said.
Changes in blood flow to the brain come from controllable factors. Smoking, cardiovascular health, diet and exercise all impact blood flow positively and negatively.
“A lot of aging research is done at the end of life,” Johnson said. “We want to look at midlife and try to predict what happens later in life so we can prevent it.”
While the brain gets softer with age, arteries get stiffer.
“We hypothesize that midlife increases in stiffness in blood vessels cause damaging pulsatile pressure to enter the brain,” Martens said. “We believe this is one of the reasons we start to develop cognitive issues at an older age because the brain is exposed to increased pressure; that pressure is likely inflicting damage on surrounding brain tissue.”
In Johnson’s Mechanical Neuroimaging Lab, researchers will use high-resolution magnetic resonance elastography (MRE) to determine where brain damage occurs and what specific brain structures may be affected.
“From an MRI perspective, most researchers look at AD and other neurodegenerative diseases like multiple sclerosis with an emphasis on detection in a hospital setting,” Johnson said. “Using highly specialized techniques we’ve developed, we focus on the earlier side and how these changes progress into disease from the neuroscience side, emphasizing prevention.”
Together, they’ll seek to learn whether arterial stiffness causes the kind of cognitive impairment seen in AD or whether the decline is associated with a loss in the integrity of brain tissue.
“If we can prove arterial stiffness is playing a causal role in cognitive aging, that would provide further support for focusing on blood vessel health as an intervention for delaying AD or other forms of dementia versus solely focusing on the brain,” Martens said.
