He specializes in leadership. He is known for his work on charisma, transformational leadership,instrumental 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
A summary of his latest work on charisma is available in a recent talk he gave at TEDx.
Antonakis is an ardent critic of the concept of emotional intelligence; his research suggests that emotional intelligence measures are not developed enough to be used for clinical purposes or in work-related or educational settings,and that emotional intelligence is not needed for leadership