Invitation to Participate in
AoM/IAoM 2010

July 28 – July 31
Las Vegas, Nevada USA

Theme: Identifying New Management, Education, Leadership and Technology Paradigms for a Conflicting World

INTRODUCTION

No subject in psychology has provoked more intense public controversy than the study of human intelligence, partly because, as Judge, Colbert & Ilies (2004) noted, few characteristics in Western society are more valued, or valuable, than intelligence. For example, in a recent Gallup poll before the 2000 presidential election, 90% of Americans responded that understanding complex issues was extremely to very important in determining which candidate they would vote for. Similarly, Lord, Foti, & Vadar (1994) found that of 59 attributes such as honesty, charisma, and kindness, intelligence was the most prototypical of a leader.

From its beginnings, research on how and why people differ in overall mental ability has fallen prey to political and social agendas that obscure or distort even the most well-established scientific findings. As Sternberg (2000) is fond of saying, “Looked at it one way, everyone knows what intelligence is; looked at it the other way, no one does.”  For these and other reasons, public understanding of intelligence falls far short of public concern about it. The IQ experts discussing their work in the public arena often feel as though they have fallen down the rabbit hole into Alice’s Wonderland (Gottfredson, 1998).

Thinking in threes is a practice with a long historical tradition positioned in a multitude of worldviews – the Greek tripod virtues of goodness, beauty, and truth, the Christian trinity, the Roman triumvirate, 18th century German psychology comprised of cognition, affection, and conation (will or motivation), Wagner’s trilogy of the Ring, Freud’s id, ego, superego, or the almost universal trilogy of mind, body, and spirit. Sternberg (1988) thought in threes when he posited a theory of the triachic mind based on his definition of intelligence as a kind of mental self-management – the mental management of one’s life in a constructive, purposive way. According to Sternberg, intelligence as mental management consists of three basic elements: (1) environmental adaptation; (2) environmental selection which occurs when an environment is unsatisfactory or attempts at adaptation may be dysfunctional; and (3) environmental shaping.  Sometimes neither adaptation nor selection is the preferred course of action. In these cases, Sternberg argues, one might consider environmental shaping which is called for when an individual’s attempts to adapt have failed or when it is impractical or undesirable to select a new environment. Whereas adaptation involves fitting oneself to the environment, shaping involves fitting the environment to oneself.

What this means is that there is no single set of behaviors that is intelligent for everyone; people react to their environments in different ways. Nevertheless what does appear to be common among successful people is the ability to capitalize on their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses. Successful leaders and followers are not only able to adapt well to their environment but also to modify this environment in order to increase the fit between the setting they find themselves in and their adaptive skills (Sternberg, 1988, pp.11-17).

In this paper, I continue the practice of thinking in threes by offering a tripartite classification of the leader’s mind that builds on early conceptualizations of analytic intelligence, extends the current debate over emotional intelligence manifested in the regulation of emotions, and includes two additional non- analytic intelligences, namely cultural and spiritual intelligence. More specifically, I suggest here that emotional, cultural and spiritual intelligence combine with cognitive and metacognitive constructs such as sensemaking, transformation and change to determine the leader’s effectiveness.

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