About Us
What is the center for Leadership Science?
How do you leverage scientific evidence to train the next generation of leaders? Can research support the advancement of women and underrepresented groups in business and industry? Answers to these questions and more are the goals of UNC Charlotte’s Center for Leadership Science (CLS), which launched in March 2023.
Housed in the Belk College of Business, the center will use research, teaching and community engagement to serve as a hub of excellence – rooted in scientific rigor and focused on building the next generation of inclusive leaders.
Co-Directors
CLS co-directors Dr. Janaki Gooty and Dr. George Banks are considered to be preeminent leadership scholars. They have completed research studies on topics in a leadership context ranging from developing relationships and managing emotions to authentic, ethical, and charismatic leadership styles. They both have emerging research streams in the area of leadership and diversity, including the study of gender and leadership, cross-cultural leadership, leading refugees as well as leadership in a virtual setting. Both faculty are recognized as senior leadership scholars in the Management and Applied Psychology fields, and both have served as associate editor or senior associate editor for the premier leadership journal, The Leadership Quarterly.
Janaki Gooty
Dr. Gooty’s work is in the area of relationships and managing emotions in the leadership space. Her work shows that building and maintaining relationships is at the core of all leadership functions. Further, she posits and finds empirical support that leaders are active managers of not only their own emotions but also employee and team’s emotions in the workplace which could be leveraged for competitive advantage.
Dr. Gooty’s research in relationships and emotions suggests that old, mechanistic ways of conceptualizing leadership as task-oriented might be outdated. Her current and future work is focused on understanding and leveraging how women and traditionally underrepresented groups in leadership positions have a natural edge in the key skills of building relational capital and emotional agility for organizations.
George Banks
Dr. Banks’ work cuts across all domains of leadership. He has published on authentic, ethical, and charismatic leadership as well as relationship research among leaders and followers and team members. He is currently conducting research on gender and leadership. As a Principal Investigator, he has received external grants from the Society for Industrial/Organizational Psychology and the Army Research Institute for the study of leadership in a virtual and cross-cultural context as well as social skills for leaders and team members.
Faculty
