Occupational positions are hierarchically arranged. Occupying leadership positions reflects one’s social status, which has been shown as an important predictor of health and well-being. To identify determinants of holding leadership positions, or leadership emergence, is a question with both important academic as well as practical significances.

Recently, there have been some remarkable breakthroughs using large samples for whole genome explorations on behaviour, social status and psychological traits, such as intelligence, personality, risk tolerance, educational attainment, and household income. However, the absence of whole genome findings on leadership has generated a seemly knowledge gap for us to form a more comprehensive understanding of relationships among our biological endowment, psychological traits, social status, and well-being.

We plan to use GWAS analyses on participants of European ancestry from the UK biobank. UK Biobank is a large prospective cohort study in the United Kingdom, which follows over 500,000 volunteers with the age from 40 to 69 during their recruitment from 2006 to 2010. For the 502,538 participants, we were able to match O*NET job titles for 274,223 individuals.

The whole genome association approach, the de facto method in studying human traits and diseases in the past decade, will be able to examine all genes of an individual to identify possible genetic associations with leadership, which will help address some long-lasting important debates such as nature vs. nurture causes of leadership emergence, trait antecedents of leadership emergence, gender differences in becoming a leader, as well as the association between leadership and health.