Connecting the dots: How parental and current socioeconomic status shape individuals’ transformational leadership

Leadership development has been characterized as an ongoing process that continues throughout a lifetime. From a long-lens perspective, this study aims to investigate how leaders’ early family socioeconomic environment influences their later transformational leadership. According to the social cognitive theory of social class, we propose that parental socioeconomic status (SES) promotes transformational leader behaviors via a positive psychological state. In the current study with 171 leaders and 684 matched subordinates, results indicated that high parental SES boosted leaders’ transformational behaviors by increasing their psychological capital, but this relationship was assuaged for leaders with high current SES. These findings contribute to the literature on transformational leadership, emphasize the importance of early life factors in leader emergence and development, and have implications for leadership development and future research.