Beyond the Management Gene: Rethinking and Advancing the Genetic Perspective in Management

Genetics has emerged as a promising avenue for explaining differences in management outcomes, attracting attention from leadership, entrepreneurship, and organizational behaviour scholars. Nonetheless, the field has faced scepticism and made only limited progress, stagnating in the pursuit of a so-called 'management gene' (e.g., leadership gene and entrepre-neurial gene). We argue that framing research around the search for a management gene has been theoretically limiting and empirically counterproductive, and that the genetic perspective could realize its promise through a nuanced understanding of how genetics relate to management outcomes. Drawing on five core genetic concepts (penetrance, phenocopy, polygenicity, pleiotropy, and epigenetics), we develop a framework comprising three intertwined stages that organize genetic methods according to their inferential strength. The stages focus on establishing whether genetic variance exists, identifying where it resides, and explaining when and why genetic predispositions become organizationally expressed. In doing so, the framework reframes non-detections as theoretically informative, revealing when and why genetic predispositions go unexpressed. It thus turns what were previously seen as dead ends into evidence that advances theory. It positions gene–environment relationships as a core theoretical concern, redirecting the field away from the search for a management gene and towards understanding why individuals produce divergent outcomes.