Many employees aspire to leadership positions, a pursuit that organizations generally support. Understandably, a key aim of organizations is to select the most suitable candidates and maximize their contributions in leadership roles to organizational functioning. However, a frequently overlooked consideration is the potential relationship of leadership role occupancy with personal health, which is a humane concern and a prerequisite for leaders to better fulfill their responsibilities in the long run. To this end, our central research question in this paper concerns whether and for whom leadership role occupancy adversely affects the functioning of the immune system—an important health parameter given the increase of infectious-disease-driven pandemics in recent years. We rely on data from the Common Cold Project (CCP), which exposed healthy adults to a common cold virus and monitored them for clinical illness and subjective symptoms under quarantine. Although there was no main effect of leadership role occupancy on clinically determined cold and subjective symptoms, our analyses revealed its effect on heart rate change as well as a number of important interactions with demographic and psychosocial factors, after controlling for a set of important covariates. Implications and future directions are discussed.
