Motivation to Lead: Chan and Drasgow, Identity, Duty, Power, and Leadership
Updated: 4 days ago
Author: Ukrainian Psychological Hub · Published: September 25, 2026 · Editorial Policy
Motivation to lead is the willingness to take on leadership roles, responsibilities, and development opportunities, together with the reasons a person is willing to do so. In the influential framework introduced by Kim-Yin Chan and Fritz Drasgow, motivation to lead is not one undifferentiated appetite for authority. It has three dimensions: affective-identity motivation to lead, social-normative motivation to lead, and noncalculative motivation to lead. These dimensions capture, respectively, wanting to lead because leadership feels personally attractive and identity-consistent; feeling that one should lead because of duty or social obligation; and being willing to lead without making personal costs and benefits the deciding calculation (Chan & Drasgow, 2001).
That distinction matters because “wanting to be a leader” can refer to very different psychological processes. Someone may actively enjoy taking the lead, accept leadership because a group expects it, step forward despite substantial personal costs, seek influence because power is rewarding, or pursue a title for status and material advantages. These motives can coexist, but they should not be treated as interchangeable. The contemporary evidence base is strongest when motivation to lead is treated as multidimensional rather than compressed into a single score. A meta-analysis synthesizing 1,154 effect sizes from 100 primary studies found that the three dimensions were only modestly related to one another and showed different patterns of antecedents and outcomes (Badura et al., 2020).
Motivation to lead is also not the same thing as leadership ability, leader emergence, leadership effectiveness, charisma, leader identity, leadership self-efficacy, or the need for power. It can help explain why people enter leadership situations and persist in them, but it does not establish whether they will lead competently, ethically, or effectively. That boundary is central to the broader psychology of leadership: motivation is one part of the leadership process, not a certificate of leadership quality.
What Is Motivation to Lead?
In leadership research, motivation to lead, usually abbreviated MTL, is an individual-differences construct describing a person’s willingness to engage in leadership training, assume leadership roles and responsibilities, invest effort in leading, and persist in leadership activity. Chan and Drasgow developed the construct to explain a missing link in individual-differences models of leadership. Traits, values, cognitive ability, past leadership experiences, and self-efficacy may influence leadership-related outcomes, but those characteristics do not by themselves explain why a person chooses to step into leadership. MTL was proposed as a more proximal motivational process connecting broader individual differences with leadership behavior (Chan & Drasgow, 2001).
This makes MTL narrower than a general ambition measure. It concerns leadership roles and activities specifically. It is also broader than a momentary intention to apply for one promotion. A person can have a recurring tendency to find leadership attractive, to accept leadership from a sense of duty, or to tolerate the personal costs of leading across situations. At the same time, MTL is responsive to experience and context rather than functioning as a fixed essence. Longitudinal, quasi-experimental, cross-cultural, and leader-identity research all suggest that motivational pathways into leadership can develop over time, although the causal evidence remains more limited than the correlational evidence.
Chan and Drasgow’s 2001 Theory
Chan and Drasgow introduced the modern MTL framework in 2001 in the Journal of Applied Psychology. Their large-scale study used three samples drawn from different occupational and cultural contexts: 1,594 Singapore military recruits, 274 Singapore junior-college students, and 293 U.S. undergraduates. Across these samples, they identified three MTL factors and tested a model in which more distal characteristics such as personality and values, together with past leadership experience and leadership self-efficacy, contributed to motivation to lead. MTL then showed incremental validity over variables such as cognitive ability, personality, values, and attitudes in predicting two behavioral measures of leadership potential (Chan & Drasgow, 2001).
The historical importance of the model is that it shifted part of leadership psychology from “Who has the right traits?” to “Why would this person choose to lead?” It therefore fits between relatively distal individual differences and more proximal leadership decisions and behaviors. Later research strengthened this distal-proximal interpretation. A meta-analytic path model found that MTL dimensions partly accounted for relationships between gender, cognitive ability, Big Five personality, past leadership experience, leader self-efficacy, and leadership outcomes (Badura et al., 2020). Because those models are based largely on nonexperimental data, “mediated” should be read as a statistical pathway consistent with theory, not as definitive proof of a causal chain.
The Three Types of Motivation to Lead
Affective-Identity Motivation to Lead: “I Want to Lead”
Affective-identity MTL describes positive affect toward leadership and a tendency to see leadership as personally attractive and compatible with one’s sense of self. People high on this dimension tend to prefer leadership roles, enjoy taking charge, and feel more naturally drawn toward leading rather than following. It is the dimension most often treated as the closest analogue to intrinsic motivation within the MTL framework.
The word “identity” is important but should not be overread. Affective-identity MTL overlaps conceptually with seeing oneself as leader-like, yet leader identity and MTL remain separable constructs. Leader identity concerns whether “leader” is part of the self-concept; affective-identity MTL concerns the attraction and willingness to engage in leadership. Studies of self-to-leader comparison show that seeing oneself as similar to admired leadership exemplars or prototypes can relate to MTL, in part through leadership self-efficacy (Guillén et al., 2015).
Affective-identity MTL has received particular attention because it is consistently connected with leadership intentions and emergence. In one study of leaderless discussions, people higher in affective-identity MTL were more likely to emerge as leaders; in longer-term student project teams, social-normative MTL also mattered (Hong et al., 2011). These findings illustrate why different MTL dimensions should not be assumed to operate identically across settings.
Social-Normative Motivation to Lead: “I Should Lead”
Social-normative MTL describes willingness to lead because leadership is experienced as a responsibility, obligation, or socially appropriate contribution. A person can score highly on this dimension without finding leadership intrinsically pleasurable. They may accept a role because colleagues need someone to coordinate the work, because they believe capable people have a duty to serve, because leadership is valued by an institution or community, or because declining would conflict with internalized norms.
Duty-based motivation is therefore different from both enthusiasm and coercion. It can be deeply internalized and meaningful, but it remains normatively organized: the person experiences reasons about what one ought to do. Research should also avoid turning social-normative MTL into a moral virtue label. A sense of duty can motivate sustained contribution, yet the fact that a person feels obligated to lead does not establish the quality of their judgment, behavior, or effects on followers.
The development of social-normative MTL is one area where intervention evidence exists. In a quasi-experimental study, business students exposed to behavior modeling that emphasized transformational leadership increased the value they placed on the leader role and showed increases in social-normative MTL and leader role identity relative to a comparison group (Waldman et al., 2013). The design supports the possibility that leadership motivation can change, while still falling short of establishing that all forms of MTL can be reliably trained across populations.
Noncalculative Motivation to Lead: Leading Without Making Personal Payoff the Deciding Factor
Noncalculative MTL is the easiest dimension to misunderstand. It does not mean that a person never notices the costs of leadership, and it is not a validated measure of altruism, selflessness, ethics, or public service. It concerns the extent to which calculations of personal costs and benefits determine willingness to lead. Someone high in noncalculative MTL is more willing to accept leadership without requiring clear personal advantages before doing so.
This dimension is partly defined through reverse-keyed ideas about benefits, privileges, and sacrifices, which makes careful interpretation especially important. A lower score can mean that a person is more attentive to the costs and rewards of leadership; it does not automatically mean selfishness. Leadership can impose real burdens: time, accountability, conflict exposure, emotional labor, reputational risk, and responsibility for consequential decisions. Calculating those costs can be rational.
The noncalculative dimension has also shown different relationships from the other two dimensions. In a study of 750 university students, noncalculative MTL did not add to leadership intention in the same way as affective-identity and social-normative MTL, while narcissism and Machiavellianism showed patterns suggesting a more calculative orientation toward leadership (Kennedy et al., 2021). This is one reason to resist turning the three dimensions into a single moral ladder.
Why the Three Dimensions Should Not Be Collapsed Into One Score
The strongest quantitative synthesis of the MTL literature concluded that affective-identity, social-normative, and noncalculative MTL are only modestly correlated and have distinct antecedent profiles. Badura and colleagues therefore argued that MTL is better operationalized as three separate motivational constructs than as one overarching global factor (Badura et al., 2020). A total score can obscure meaningful differences between a person who loves leading, a person who feels obligated to lead, and a person who is willing to lead without requiring personal gain.
This is more than a psychometric technicality. Suppose two people have the same global MTL score. One may score very high on affective-identity MTL and low on social-normative MTL; the other may show the reverse pattern. Their reasons for accepting a leadership role, the kinds of situations that activate their motivation, and the behaviors associated with that motivation may differ. A single total can make these psychologically distinct profiles look identical.
Motivation to Lead, Leader Identity, and Leadership Self-Efficacy
Three constructs are often discussed together: motivation to lead, leader identity, and leadership self-efficacy. They are related because all can influence whether people enter and persist in leadership development, but they answer different questions. MTL asks whether and why a person is willing to lead. Leader identity asks whether being a leader is part of the person’s self-concept. Leadership self-efficacy asks how capable the person believes they are of performing leadership-related actions.
These constructs can diverge in real life. Someone may believe they could lead effectively but have little desire to do it. Another person may strongly identify as a leader while privately doubting their ability in a new setting. A third may accept a leadership role from duty despite having neither a strong leader identity nor high confidence. Treating these profiles as the same phenomenon removes precisely the psychological differences that the MTL framework was designed to explain.
Research on leader identity supports a dynamic view. Guillén and colleagues found that comparisons with concrete leadership exemplars and broader leader prototypes related to motivation to lead; leadership self-efficacy mediated the association for self-to-exemplar comparisons (Guillén et al., 2015). More recent work on the “future leader self” likewise treats imagined future leadership identity as motivationally consequential for current leader-development behavior (Morgan et al., 2025). These studies support a reciprocal developmental picture in which experiences, identity, efficacy beliefs, and motivation can reinforce one another over time.
Motivation to Lead vs Need for Power
Motivation to lead and the need for power are related concepts, but they are not synonyms. Need for power refers to motivation for impact, influence, control, or power-related experiences. MTL concerns willingness to take on leadership roles and responsibilities. A person can want influence without wanting the administrative, relational, and accountability burdens of leadership. Conversely, someone can accept leadership from duty without having a strong generalized appetite for power.
The difference is especially important because leadership itself is not identical to power. Power concerns asymmetric capacity to affect outcomes; authority concerns legitimate or institutionally recognized rights to direct; status concerns respect and social standing; leadership concerns a broader influence process involving direction, coordination, meaning, and followership. These distinctions are developed in Power and Leadership: Influence, Status, Authority, and Followership. MTL is a motivational construct located on the leader side of that process, not a measure of how much power a person actually possesses.
Cross-sectional and validation studies have found associations between MTL and McClelland-related motive measures, but that evidence supports relatedness rather than identity. The Italian validation study, for example, reported correlations between MTL scores and McClelland scales while also treating MTL as a distinct construct (Bobbio & Manganelli Rattazzi, 2006).
Where Motivation to Lead Comes From
Chan and Drasgow’s model proposed that MTL is shaped by a network of antecedents rather than by one “leadership gene” or one decisive personality trait. Personality, values, past leadership experience, cognitive ability, and leadership self-efficacy occupy different positions in the model. Later meta-analysis broadly supported this distal-proximal structure while also showing that the three MTL dimensions have different antecedent patterns (Badura et al., 2020).
Personality Traits
Personality traits can make certain leadership experiences and motives more probable, but personality is not motivation itself. Extraversion, conscientiousness, openness, emotional stability, and other traits show relationships with MTL dimensions, yet those relationships vary by dimension. The meta-analytic model indicates that personality can affect leadership emergence and effectiveness partly through motivational pathways, while also retaining other routes to leadership outcomes (Badura et al., 2020).
This distinction prevents a common error: concluding that someone who looks socially dominant or extraverted must strongly want leadership, or that a reserved person necessarily lacks leadership motivation. Traits concern relatively broad patterns of thinking, feeling, and behavior. MTL concerns the willingness and reasons to assume leadership. They correlate, but one cannot be read directly from the other.
Values and Social Norms
Values matter because leadership can be interpreted as service, achievement, responsibility, influence, status, sacrifice, or control. Social-normative MTL is particularly sensitive to learned expectations about obligation and appropriate conduct. The original model explicitly incorporated values and cultural orientations among its antecedents (Chan & Drasgow, 2001). Cross-cultural validation research shows why this component deserves care: the three-factor framework can be reproduced in some settings, but the exact factor structure and meaning of items have not been perfectly invariant across all national and institutional contexts.
Past Leadership Experience
Past experience can alter motivation in several directions. Successful leadership may increase self-efficacy, strengthen a leader identity, and make future leadership more attractive. Negative experiences can reveal costs that reduce willingness to lead. Merely occupying a title does not guarantee either effect. What matters is how the experience is interpreted, whether the person receives mastery feedback, and whether the context associates leadership with meaningful contribution or chronic burden.
This is one reason the question Are Leaders Born or Made? cannot be answered by treating motivation as fixed. Longitudinal evidence indicates that developmental histories are associated with adult MTL, while training and role experiences can modify leadership-related identities and motives.
Leadership Self-Efficacy
Leadership self-efficacy is one of the most consistent proximal correlates in MTL models. People are generally more willing to enter demanding roles when they believe they can perform the required actions. Yet efficacy is not a guarantee of actual skill, and low efficacy can sometimes be realistic. Selection systems that interpret confidence as competence risk promoting the most self-assured rather than the most capable.
Development Across the Lifespan
MTL has developmental roots, but the evidence does not support a simple deterministic story. In the Fullerton Longitudinal Study, academic intrinsic motivation measured from childhood through adolescence was associated years later with affective-identity and noncalculative MTL in adulthood, but not with social-normative MTL. IQ showed no direct contribution to adult MTL in that analysis (Gottfried et al., 2011). The study is valuable because of its long time span, but a longitudinal association still does not establish that childhood intrinsic motivation causes adult leadership motivation.
Leadership motivation can also change in educational and organizational contexts. A 2025 systematic review of higher-education research identified internal correlates such as leadership self-efficacy and need for power, and external factors such as leadership programs, opportunities to lead, campus support, and team experiences (Amadi et al., 2025). That review included only 13 studies, was restricted to higher-education populations and English-language research, and should therefore be interpreted as a focused synthesis rather than a universal model of adult leadership motivation.
Motivation to Lead and Leadership Intention
Motivation to lead is related to leadership intention, but the two constructs should be kept separate. MTL concerns reasons and motivational orientation toward leadership. Leadership intention is a more immediate stated plan or desire to claim a leadership role. Someone can have a generally positive orientation toward leadership without intending to seek a role now because the timing, organization, family situation, or specific position is unattractive.
Kennedy and colleagues made this distinction explicit in a study of university students. Affective-identity and social-normative MTL helped account for relationships between personality and leadership intentions, whereas noncalculative MTL did not contribute in the same way (Kennedy et al., 2021). The design was cross-sectional and used a student sample, so it supports construct differentiation more strongly than it supports causal conclusions about how intentions are formed.
Motivation to Lead and Leader Emergence
Leader emergence asks who becomes perceived, accepted, selected, or treated as a leader. It is not the same as effectiveness. MTL is relevant because people who are more willing to claim leadership roles are more likely to place themselves in situations where emergence is possible, invest effort in coordinating others, and accept formal leadership opportunities.
Evidence supports this relationship. Luria and Berson found that MTL predicted teamwork behavior and informal leader emergence in one military sample and predicted later formal leadership role attainment in a follow-up sample (Luria & Berson, 2013). Hong, Catano, and Liao similarly found that different MTL dimensions related to emergence under different group conditions (Hong et al., 2011). At the broader level, the meta-analysis by Badura and colleagues found general associations between the three MTL dimensions and leader emergence (Badura et al., 2020).
Still, emergence should not be treated as proof that a group has identified its most effective future leader. People can emerge because they speak first, project confidence, volunteer, are highly visible, fit a leader prototype, possess status, or have strong motivation to lead. Some of those factors can contribute to effectiveness; others primarily affect who gets noticed or who claims the role.
Motivation to Lead and Leadership Effectiveness
Leadership effectiveness asks whether leadership contributes to valued outcomes such as team performance, decision quality, learning, adaptation, safety, retention, coordination, or follower well-being. MTL can support effectiveness indirectly by increasing effort, persistence, learning, and willingness to accept difficult responsibilities. But motivation alone cannot substitute for knowledge, judgment, technical expertise, interpersonal skill, ethical restraint, or situational fit.
The Badura meta-analysis found that MTL dimensions were generally associated with leadership performance and effectiveness, as well as with more transformational and transactional behavior and less laissez-faire behavior (Badura et al., 2020). This is meaningful evidence, but the effect should not be converted into “the more motivated, the better the leader.” Meta-analytic association does not imply unlimited linear benefit, and the underlying studies use heterogeneous criteria and designs.
A multistage study of U.S. Army noncommissioned officers provides a useful illustration. Motivation to lead and leadership experience contributed within a model of leader performance, but more proximal leadership knowledge, skills, and abilities showed a relatively strong direct relationship with performance (Van Iddekinge et al., 2009). Motivation helps people enter and invest in leadership; competence still has to be developed and demonstrated.
Does High Motivation to Lead Mean Good Leadership?
No. High MTL tells us something about willingness and motives, not whether the resulting leadership will be competent, ethical, prosocial, or effective. The same motivational energy can operate through different personalities, values, goals, and organizational incentives. Badura and colleagues explicitly noted that traits often regarded as leadership assets can have a darker side transmitted through MTL pathways (Badura et al., 2020). Kennedy and colleagues likewise found that narcissism and Machiavellianism were positively related to affective-identity MTL in their student sample while showing negative relations with noncalculative MTL (Kennedy et al., 2021).
This does not mean that people high in MTL are “dark” leaders. It means the construct is motivational, not moral. A person can be highly motivated to lead for reasons connected to service, responsibility, achievement, identity, power, status, ideology, personal benefit, or mixtures of these motives. Leadership selection therefore needs independent evidence about capability, behavior, integrity, and performance.
Newer research has also begun testing nonlinear possibilities. A recent study proposed that affective-identity MTL may show a curvilinear relationship with leadership emergence under some team conditions. That work is better treated as emerging evidence than as a replacement for the broader meta-analytic conclusion. It raises a useful question for future research: when can very strong desire to lead become overclaiming, crowd out others, or fit poorly with a team’s shared leadership needs?
Motivation to Lead Is Not a Leadership Style
MTL should not be placed on a list beside transformational, transactional, servant, autocratic, democratic, or laissez-faire leadership as though it were another leadership style. A leadership style describes a recurring pattern of leader behavior or interaction. MTL describes motivational orientation toward taking on and investing in leadership. A person with high affective-identity MTL could enact very different styles depending on skills, values, role demands, culture, and learned behavior.
The meta-analytic finding that MTL correlates with transformational, transactional, and laissez-faire behavior demonstrates association between motivation and style, not equivalence. The construct also differs from leadership theory. Chan and Drasgow’s MTL model is a theory about motivational individual differences and their place in leadership processes; transformational or contingency theories explain different leadership constructs and mechanisms.
Motivation to Lead Is Not Management Ambition
Wanting a management position can involve pay, career progression, professional identity, access to resources, job security, or formal authority. Those goals may overlap with MTL, but they are not identical. Management includes planning, organizing, staffing, monitoring, and coordinating systems of work; leadership concerns influence and collective direction. A person may want management responsibility without strongly enjoying leadership, or may exercise substantial informal leadership without wanting a managerial career.
This distinction also matters in succession planning. Asking “Who wants the promotion?” identifies applicants, not necessarily people with the most useful leadership motives or the highest leadership capability. Conversely, people with valuable leadership potential may decline a promotion because the role has been designed around excessive administrative load, weak support, poor work-life boundaries, or unattractive political costs.
How Motivation to Lead Is Measured
The original Chan and Drasgow MTL scale contains 27 self-report items, nine for each of the three dimensions. Respondents indicate agreement with statements designed to capture preference for leading, duty-based acceptance of leadership, and the role of personal costs and benefits. The scale is a research measure of motivational orientation. It is not a diagnostic test, a clinical instrument, or a direct measure of leadership competence.
Psychometric evidence is reasonably substantial but not uniform. A reliability-generalization study examining 95 independent samples from 82 studies reported sample-size-weighted mean internal-consistency estimates of .85 for affective-identity MTL, .80 for noncalculative MTL, and .75 for social-normative MTL. Reliability varied across sample and scale characteristics, including linguistic distance and national culture (Novelli et al., 2017). Reliability describes consistency of scores; it does not by itself establish validity, fairness, predictive utility, or causal meaning.
Alternative forms also exist. An Italian validation study found that the original 27-item configuration did not fit its sample optimally and proposed a reduced 15-item three-factor form with satisfactory reliability (Bobbio & Manganelli Rattazzi, 2006). Shorter forms have been used in later studies as well. Researchers and practitioners therefore need to specify exactly which form they are using instead of reporting only “the MTL scale.”
Cross-Cultural Measurement and Context
The original theory was tested across Singaporean and U.S. samples, but international use has shown that translation and cultural context matter. Leadership carries different institutional meanings across militaries, universities, corporations, professions, and societies. Duty, hierarchy, service, status, and the expected costs of leadership are culturally organized, so identical wording can function differently across contexts.
A 2024 Japanese validation study tested the original three-factor approach in 500 university students and 500 employees aged 20–29. The authors reported an appropriate three-factor model and scalar measurement invariance between students and employees and between men and women within their sample (Tanaka et al., 2024). At the same time, the same paper reviews earlier international work in which researchers shortened the scale or added context-specific dimensions. The sensible conclusion is neither that the original scale is universally invariant nor that it fails outside its original samples. Measurement needs to be demonstrated in the population where scores will be interpreted.
What About Gender Differences?
MTL studies sometimes report average gender differences, particularly for affective-identity motivation, and the Badura meta-analysis included gender among the distal variables in its model. These patterns require contextual interpretation. Average group differences can reflect role expectations, differential access to leadership experience, stereotype-based opportunity structures, work-family costs, confidence, discrimination, and the meaning attached to claiming leadership, as well as individual preferences.
A measurement result should not be converted into an assumption about an individual. Men and women each show wide within-group variation. MTL is also only one pathway into leadership. Selection or development decisions based on group averages would confuse population-level association with individual capability.
Can Motivation to Lead Be Developed?
The evidence supports a qualified yes. MTL is not frozen. Leadership experience, self-efficacy, identity, educational programs, role models, and institutional opportunities can be associated with change. The quasi-experimental work by Waldman and colleagues showed change in social-normative MTL and leader role identity after a leadership-focused intervention (Waldman et al., 2013), and higher-education studies summarized in the 2025 systematic review report changes associated with leadership courses and immersive programs (Amadi et al., 2025).
The stronger claim—that a particular training reliably produces durable increases in all MTL dimensions and then causes better leadership performance—has much thinner support. Motivation can rise without competence, and a program can increase willingness to lead without changing the organizational conditions that make leadership sustainable. Leadership development should therefore integrate motivation with skills, feedback, role design, ethical standards, and opportunities for real practice.
Why Some Capable People Do Not Want to Lead
Low MTL is not evidence of low intelligence, low worth, weak character, or a psychological disorder. People may prefer expert roles, creative autonomy, technical depth, or individual contribution. They may accurately perceive that a leadership position carries costs that exceed its rewards. They may dislike conflict, bureaucracy, constant interpersonal demands, visibility, political negotiation, or responsibility for other people’s outcomes. They may also work in organizations where leadership has been designed badly.
This is where MTL connects to power aversion and leadership avoidance. Low motivation to lead, power aversion, low leader identity, low leadership self-efficacy, responsibility aversion, and preference for nonmanagerial work can produce similar outward behavior—declining leadership—through different psychological routes. They should not be collapsed into one explanation.
Organizations often create their own “leadership shortage” by making leadership unattractive. If the role promises longer hours, more conflict, less autonomy, ambiguous accountability, weak support, and only modest additional reward, reluctance may reflect realistic appraisal rather than a motivational deficit. Understanding MTL therefore requires attention to both the person and the design of the role.
How Organizations Should Use Motivation-to-Lead Research
MTL research is most useful as one part of a broader leadership system. It can help explain why some people volunteer for development, why others avoid formal roles, why leader pipelines lose capable candidates, and why two equally skilled employees respond differently to the same opportunity. It can also improve development conversations by separating “Can I lead?”, “Do I see myself as a leader?”, “Do I want to lead?”, and “Why would I lead?”
It is much less defensible to use an MTL score as a stand-alone promotion gate. The construct does not measure the full criterion domain of leadership performance. A high score can coexist with poor judgment, destructive behavior, weak technical knowledge, or motives that create risk. A low score can coexist with excellent leadership capability in a person who is selective about when they accept responsibility.
For selection, organizations should combine demonstrated performance, structured assessment of job-relevant leadership competencies, behavioral evidence, reference to situational demands, and motivational information. For development, they should investigate why motivation is low before trying to “increase” it. The intervention for low self-efficacy may be mastery experience and coaching; the intervention for excessive role burden may be job redesign; the response to a genuine preference for expert work may be a respected nonmanagerial career path.
What the Evidence Establishes—and What It Does Not
Established evidence: Chan and Drasgow’s three-dimensional MTL model has a substantial research history; meta-analysis supports treating the dimensions separately; MTL dimensions are associated with leader emergence, leadership behavior, and effectiveness criteria; leader self-efficacy, personality, prior experience, and other individual differences are related to MTL; and the original scale has been adapted and validated in multiple contexts.
Evidence with important limits: much of the MTL literature is correlational or based on self-report. Meta-analytic path models clarify patterns but do not turn correlations into causal effects. Longitudinal studies improve temporal inference, yet unmeasured variables can still explain associations. Quasi-experimental and educational studies suggest some malleability, but the intervention literature is not strong enough to justify universal claims about changing MTL. Cross-cultural studies show both reproducibility and measurement variation.
Emerging evidence: newer work examines future leader selves, nonlinear effects, context-specific leadership intentions, and the interaction between MTL and team conditions. These studies expand the theory but should be integrated with, rather than substituted for, the larger evidence base.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is motivation to lead in psychology?
Motivation to lead is an individual-differences construct describing a person’s willingness to assume leadership roles, responsibilities, and development opportunities, along with the reasons underlying that willingness. In the Chan and Drasgow model, it has three dimensions: affective-identity, social-normative, and noncalculative MTL.
Who developed the motivation-to-lead theory?
Kim-Yin Chan and Fritz Drasgow developed the influential three-factor model and published it in 2001 in the Journal of Applied Psychology (Chan & Drasgow, 2001). Earlier work by Chan also examined leadership motivation and vocational interests.
What are the three types of motivation to lead?
Affective-identity MTL reflects wanting and enjoying leadership and seeing it as compatible with the self. Social-normative MTL reflects a sense that one should lead because of responsibility or obligation. Noncalculative MTL reflects willingness to lead without making personal costs and benefits the decisive calculation.
Is motivation to lead a personality trait?
MTL is an individual-differences construct, but it is not one of the Big Five personality traits. Personality traits are broader and more distal. They can contribute to MTL, which is more specifically focused on leadership roles and decisions.
Is motivation to lead the same as leader identity?
No. Leader identity concerns whether “leader” is part of the self-concept. MTL concerns whether and why a person is willing to lead. The constructs often reinforce one another, but a person can score high on one and lower on the other.
Is motivation to lead the same as leadership self-efficacy?
No. Leadership self-efficacy is confidence in one’s capability to perform leadership-related actions. MTL is willingness and motivation. Someone can believe they are capable but not want the role, or want the role while still feeling uncertain about their capability.
Is motivation to lead the same as need for power?
No. Need for power concerns motivation for influence, impact, or control. MTL concerns willingness to assume leadership roles and responsibilities. The constructs can be associated without being identical.
Does motivation to lead predict who becomes a leader?
On average, yes. Meta-analysis and primary studies associate MTL with leader emergence and formal leadership role attainment (Badura et al., 2020); (Luria & Berson, 2013). That association is probabilistic and context-dependent, not a guarantee for an individual.
Does high motivation to lead predict effective leadership?
It is positively associated with leadership effectiveness criteria in meta-analytic research, but it is not sufficient for effectiveness. Skill, judgment, knowledge, behavior, follower relationships, task demands, and context remain essential. MTL should never be used as a synonym for leadership potential or leadership quality.
Can motivation to lead be changed?
Some evidence indicates that leadership education, experience, self-efficacy, and identity development can change aspects of MTL. The causal and long-term intervention evidence is still limited, so claims that a specific program can reliably “install” leadership motivation should be treated cautiously.
Is low motivation to lead a problem?
Not inherently. Low MTL can reflect a legitimate preference for expert, creative, technical, or individual-contributor roles, realistic appraisal of leadership costs, weak fit with a specific organization, or low interest in formal responsibility. It becomes practically relevant when a person wants leadership outcomes but avoids every developmental step needed to reach them, or when an organization depends on leadership roles that capable people reasonably find unattractive.
Should companies test motivation to lead when selecting managers?
MTL can provide useful developmental or research information, but it should not be a stand-alone selection criterion. Any employment use requires evidence that the chosen measure is reliable, valid for the relevant population and purpose, job-related, fair, and combined with assessment of actual competencies and performance.
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References
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