John Antonakis

Who is John Antonakis?

John Antonakis is a professor of organizational behavior at the Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Lausanne. He was born and raised in South Africa of Greek parents and is Swiss naturalized. He received his Ph.D. in applied management and decision sciences and did a post-doc in cognitive psychology; he did undergraduate work at the University of the Witwatersrand in business and economics, and received his Bachelor and Master degrees at Johnson and Wales University.

He specializes in leadership. He is known for his work on charisma, transformational leadership, leader distance, and leader research methods. He has communicated his methods work to a wide audience in a podcast on endogeneity and causality. 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; refer to his podcast for further information. Lately, he has been working with Philippe Jacquart in predicting the U.S. presidential elections; their model predicted that Obama would win.