Chapter Three

The Leader:
Personality,
Motives, and Other
Personal Qualities

McGraw-Hill/Irwin Copyright © 2011 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
 Ralph Stogdill (1984)

 Traits are important part of leadership

 Leadership is proactive versus passive in nature
 Leadership is a working relationship that includes
the orchestration of group activity
 A leader’s traits must fit with the situation
 Important traits
 Capacity, achievement, responsibility, participation,
status

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 Edwin A. Locke

 The Essence of Leadership: The Four Keys to

Leading Successfully
 Four parts for effective leadership:
 Motives and traits
 Knowledge, skills, abilities
 Vision
 Implementation of the vision
 According to Kirkpatrick and Locke, leadership traits
are important “preconditions” giving an individual
the potential to be an effective leader

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 Other Researchers

 Fred Fiedler
 “Experience has shown to be completely unrelated to
leadership performance”
 Judge, Bono, Ilies, and Gerhardt
 Emergence and performance
 Arvey, Rotundo, Johnson, Zhang, and McGue
 Explored the genetic-leadership linkage

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Reading 7
Leadership: Do Traits Matter?

 In 19th and 20th century, great man theories were

popular
 Great men are born and not made
 Trait theories
 Leaders’ characteristics are simply different from
nonleaders’
 Traits alone are not sufficient for successful
business leadership—they are only a precondition
 Leaders who possess the requisite traits must take
certain actions to be successful

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 Drive and Leadership Motivation

 Drive: A constellation of traits and motives reflecting

a high-effort level
 Achievement, ambition, energy, tenacity, initiative
 Leadership motivation: The desire to influence and
lead others
 Types of dominance:
 Personalized power motive (power lust) – Leader seeks
power as an end in itself and uses it to dominate
others
 Socialized power motive (desire to lead) – Power as a
means to achieve the desired goals of the entire
organization

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 Honesty and Integrity

 Integrity is the correspondence between word and

deed
 Honesty refers to being truthful or non-deceitful
 Effective leaders are credible, with excellent
reputations, and high levels of integrity
 Leaders can gain trust by being predictable,
consistent, and persistent and by making competent
decisions

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 Self Confidence and Cognitive Ability

 Self-confidence plays an important role in decision

making and in gaining others’ trust
 Emotional stability
 Successful leaders are calm, confident, and predictable
during crisis
 Leaders must gather, integrate, and interpret
enormous amounts of information
 Intelligence may be a trait that followers look for in a
leader

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 Knowledge of the Business
and Other Traits
 Effective leaders have a high degree of knowledge
about the company, industry, and technical matters
 Other traits
 Charisma
 Creativity/Originality
 Flexibility

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 Conclusions

 Leadership is a demanding, unrelenting job with

enormous pressures and grave responsibilities
 In the realm of leadership, the individual does
matter
 Regardless of whether leaders are born or made or
some combination of both, it is clear that leaders are
not like other people
 Leaders need to have the “right stuff”

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Reading 8
Personality and Leadership: A Qualitative and
Quantitative Review
 The “great man” hypothesis gave rise to trait theory
of leadership
 Trait theory
 Leadership depends on the personal qualities of the
leader
 Leadership does not necessarily reside within the
grasp of a few heroic men
 Results of investigations relating personality traits to
leadership have been inconsistent

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Table 1
Past Qualitative Reviews of the Traits of
Effective or Emergent Leaders

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 Qualitative Review

 Significant trait overlap existed between reviews and

a labeling dilemma occurred
 A taxonomic structure for classifying and organizing
traits did not exist

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 Big Five

 Neuroticism
 Poor emotional adjustment
 Extraversion
 Sociable, assertive, active
 Openness to experience
 Imaginative, nonconforming, unconventional,
autonomous
 Agreeableness
 Trusting, compliant, caring, gentle
 Conscientiousness
 Achievement and dependability

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 Relationship of
Big Five Traits to Leadership
 The relative predictive powers of the Big Five traits is
studied with respect to:
 Dominance and sociability
 Achievement-orientation and dependability
 Self-esteem and locus of control

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Table 4
Relationship Between Big Five Traits
and Leadership by Leadership Criteria

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Table 5
Relationship Between Big Five Traits
and Leadership, by Study Setting

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 Discussion

 Findings:
 Extraversion emerged as the most consistent correlate
of leadership
 After extraversion, conscientiousness and openness to
experience were the strongest and most consistent
 Openness to experience was the most controversial
and least understood
 Neuroticism failed to emerge as a significant predictor
of leadership
 Agreeableness was the least relevant

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 Discussion

 Collectively, the results provide support for the

relevance of the five-factor model in leadership
research
 The perceived efficacy of the trait approach has
waxed and waned throughout the past century
 On the basis of the results presented in this study,
future research should develop process models that
illuminate the dispositional source of leadership

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