John Antonakis
Swiss psychologist and professor of organizational behavior at the Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Lausanne and editor-in-chief of The Leadership Quarterly
John Antonakis (born March 29, 1969) is a professor of organizational behavior at the Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Lausanne. He teaches leadership and applied statistics courses. He was editor-in-chief of The Leadership Quarterly between 2017 and 2022. The status and prestige of the journal increased strongly during his tenure (from an impact factor of 3.307 to 7.5, touching a high of 10.517), wherein he and his team focused on publishing more experimental research, ensuring the use of robust designs to enable causal conclusions in applied research or proper description of a phenomenon in basic research, as well as the use of open-science practices.
Early life and education
He was born and raised in South Africa of Greek parents (Paul Antonakis and Irene Bardi) and is Swiss naturalized. He received his Ph.D. in applied management and decision sciences (Walden University) with a focus on leadership measurement and psychometrics and was a post-doc in cognitive psychology (Yale University); he did undergraduate work at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in business and economics, and received his Bachelor and master's degrees at Johnson and Wales University in business administration.
Academic career
He specializes in leadership and charismatic leadership in particular. He has communicated his work on leadership to a wide audiences, including work in applied statistics on endogeneity and causality, and general problems in science. His article "Predicting Elections: Child's Play" published in the prestigious journal Science engendered a lot of interest because it showed that little children were able to predict results of election outcomes merely by rating the faces of the politician candidates. A summary of his work on charisma is available in a recent talk he gave at TEDx and a keynote address at the British Psychological Society meeting
U.S. Election prediction model
He has developed a model with Philippe Jacquart to predict the U.S. presidential elections; their model predicted that Obama would win (refer to Antonakis's YouTube video on the Obama-Romney election race).
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6219225. VIAF identifies the subject as 233373391. The Library of Congress control number is n2003102776. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1969, 2017 and 2022.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Antonakis” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.