People with ambitions to climb the corporate ladder have been advised to learn debating skills.
New research from MIT has found that people who train as debaters are more likely to advance into leadership roles.
This is largely due to good debaters having the ability exercise professional assertiveness.
“Leadership development is a multi-billion-dollar industry, where people spend a lot of money trying to help individuals emerge as leaders,” MIT Associate Professor Jackson Lu said.
“But the public doesn’t actually know what would be effective, because there hasn’t been a lot of causal evidence. That’s exactly what we provide.”
The research paper, “Breaking Ceilings: Debate Training Promotes Leadership Emergence by Increasing Assertiveness,” was published this week in the Journal of Applied Psychology.
The researchers conducted two experiments. In the first, 471 employees in a Fortune 100 firm were randomly assigned to receive either nine weeks of debate training or no training.
Examined 18 months later, those receiving debate training were more likely to have advanced to leadership roles, by about 12 percentage points.
The second experiment, conducted with 975 university participants, further tested the causal effects of debate training in a controlled setting.
“Participants were randomly assigned to receive debate training, an alternative non-debate training, or no training,” the research report said.
“Consistent with the first experiment, participants receiving the debate training were more likely to emerge as leaders in subsequent group activities, an effect statistically explained by their increased assertiveness.”
Dr Lu said assertiveness was conceptually different from aggressiveness.
“To speak up in meetings or classrooms, people don’t need to be aggressive jerks,” he said. “You can ask questions politely, yet still effectively express opinions. Of course, that’s different from not saying anything at all.”
The full report is on the MIT website.
