The Hidden Talent of Minority Leaders: Team Conflict Acumen

Demographic minorities remain highly unrepresented in leadership positions. We argue here that this is especially problematic, as their unique experiences in society may enable them to more effectively lead than their majority counterparts. Specifically, we argue that minorities have learned to be highly attuned to conflict in their surrounding environments, enabling what we call ‘conflict acumen’, or the ability to accurately identify the levels of conflict in their team. Such conflict acumen can help leaders gain maximum value out of team task conflicts, enabling minority leaders to lead teams to better performance than majority leaders. We find support for these ideas in a multi-source field study of bank branch offices using both survey and archival data. We show that minority leaders more accurately assess the task conflict levels, and this conflict acumen in turn explains their ability to generate higher revenues in their branches than do majority leaders.