Identical twins Dan and Dean Oberpriller, 55-year-old Minneapolis-based entrepreneurs, have always held leadership positions and had strong leadership role models. They both graduated with majors in journalism at the University of Minnesota and spent several years in the upper ranks of Minnesota’s premier advertising agencies before striking out on their own.

Were the Oberprillers born as potential leaders or did their environments shape their future roles as leaders? “The nature versus nurture question has been around for centuries,” said Richard Arvey, a Carlson School professor of human resources and industrial relations and an adjunct faculty member of the Unversity’s psychology department. Arvey studied pairs of twins and the leadership roles they’ve held over the years to get the answer: 30 percent of leadership is based on genetics, while 70 percent is dependent on environmental factors.

What does this mean? “People are not as malleable as we think,” said Arvey. “While environmental influences—70 percent—determine many of our leadership behaviors and the roles we obtain, our genes still exert a sizable influence over whether we will become leaders.” Therefore, leadership is both inherited and acquired. “And although 30 percent may not seem like a high number, statistically it is strong,” Arvey said. “Leaders aren’t just made.”

The availability of the Minnesota Twin Registry—a University of Minnesota database tracking the 10,000 surviving pairs of twins born in Minnesota between 1936 and 1981 for research purposes—enabled Arvey to examine the issue in a scientific way. By studying pairs of twins that were reared apart, researchers have proven that similarities in terms of personality, interests, and attitudes are due to genes rather than environmental influences. The environments make them different, while their genes make them similar.

Arvey and his colleagues drew on the registry and its findings to survey 325 pairs of identical and fraternal male twins who were born between 1961 and 1964 and raised together. “Identical twins share 100 percent of their genes, and fraternal twins share about 50 percent. This allowed us to look at twins who were raised together and tease apart the contributions of genetics versus environmental factors in leadership,” Arvey said. Their findings are scheduled for publication in the January 2006 journal issue of Leadership Quarterly . Co-authors are Maria Rotundo, University of Toronto; and Wendy Johnson, Matt McGue, and Zhe Zhang, University of Minnesota graduate students.

To tease apart these contributions, participants were asked a series of questions centered on the desire to influence others, to be the center of attention, to persist when others give up, and to be with people. All are questions found to have a genetic component. “If you answer these questions positively, you are probably genetically wired for leadership,” said Arvey. Next, he took an inventory of the leadership roles they had held throughout their lives, including titles such as supervisor, director, vice president, or president.  “A great deal of personality is genetic based,” explained Arvey. “If your personality is such that you aspire to and have held these positions, then these roles also suggest a genetic link. This study does not identify a specific gene, but looks at whether an individual has gravitated to these positions in the past.”

This was a first step in looking at genetics in the workplace, Arvey said, and there’s still much to be done. If 70 percent of leadership is environmentally based, what are the various environmental influences that make a leader? How do genetics and the environment interact in creating a leader? What if gender is factored in? “These are all questions waiting to be answered,” Arvey said. “It also doesn’t mean that if you are a leader, you’ll be a good one.” The study looked at who became leaders and why, not at leadership effectiveness.

The Oberprillers were not a part of the study, but agree that genetics is a key factor in their desire to lead. “Our father owned a bakery, and we assisted him at an early age,” Dan said. “Although he was an entrepreneur, he actually discouraged us from going into the bakery business. So in this regard, I think our genetics played a stronger role in our desire to lead our own businesses. But we can’t factor out all the other people along the way who encouraged us and were an environmental influence.” Their mother was very active in the community and a leader in getting people to vote and in arranging political caucuses.

Another interesting factor to point out is that Dan and Dean have worked together on and off over the years and decided early on in their lives that they would not compete. “We decided to share the leadership tasks of whatever we undertook together, including our own advertising company, DBK&O,” said Dean. “We had fiery exchanges, but worked out a division of labor. We could trust each other.”

Although both of them believe they were born to lead, they were able to temper their leadership desires, in order to cooperate in whatever environments they were in. Arvey said.