Audience
The psychology department welcomes Professor Stephen Zaccaro as the fourth and final speaker in its 2024-2025 lecture series: The Psychology of Leadership. He will present "Leadership Memes and Stories: Implications for Early Leadership Development."
Date: Friday, March 28, 2025
Time: 11:30 a.m.
Location: Goodpaster Hall 195
Leadership development can start early in childhood and adolescence with the emergence and growth of leader mindsets. These include leader identity and leadership self-efficacy. These mindsets are linked to growth in leader skillsets. In this talk, Dr. Zaccaro will provide a framework describing four sets of leadership memes. The memes are shown in stories, art and literature about leadership that have been conveyed since antiquity. They contribute to the development of leader mindsets in children. He will also describe two research studies on early leadership development. One of them examined leadership themes in popular television programs watched by children and adolescents. The second explored the concept of motivation to engage in leadership development and its link to agency in such development.
Zaccaro is a professor of psychology at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia and President of Zaccaro Leadership Systems, LLC. He is also an experienced leadership development consultant. He received his PhD in social psychology from the University of Connecticut. He has studied, taught and consulted about leadership and teams for over 40 years. He has written over 150 journal articles, book chapters, and technical reports on leadership, group dynamics, and team performance. He has authored a book titled "The Nature of Executive Leadership: A Conceptual and Empirical Analysis of Success" and has co-edited six other books on the topics of organizational agility, organizational leadership, leader development, multiteam systems, cyber-security, and occupational stress. He has worked with executives and managers from private industry as well as from the educational, nonprofit, government, and military sectors. He serves on the editorial boards of The Leadership Quarterly, Advances in Global Leadership, Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies, and Journal of Character and Leadership Development. He is also an associate editor for the Journal of Business and Psychology. He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and of the American Psychological Association, Divisions 14 (Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology) and 19 (Military Psychology). He is also the current president of the Interdisciplinary Network for Group Research (INGRoup)
This event may be used to satisfy the Lecture Reflection Requirement in PSYC206 and PSYC493/494.