Beyond the Big Five: Leader Goal Orientation as a Predictor of Leadership Effectiveness

This study examined proximal traits as mediators of the relationships between distal traits and leadership effectiveness. Specifically, we examined goal orientation, leadership self-efficacy, and motivation to lead (MTL) as antecedents of leadership effectiveness, after controlling for the Big Five personality traits. We tested our hypotheses with a sample of 100 leaders of four-person teams performing a manufacturing task in a laboratory setting. Consistent with expectation, leadership self-efficacy partially mediated the relationships between learning goal orientation and Affective-Identity MTL as well as Social-Normative MTL, after controlling for the Big Five. Noncalculative MTL related significantly to averaged team member ratings of leadership effectiveness, after controlling for both the leader's and the team member's personality. These results help aid in our understanding of why leader traits relate to leadership effectiveness.     

Personological dynamics of leadership

This study reports on the personality correlates of rated leadership using the California Psychological Inventory (CPI) and 50 college football players. Subjects were also given leadership scores using a CPI-based leadership regression equation. Two findings are of interest. First, consistent with past research, leaders were characterized by high scores on CPI Scales for Dominance, Self-Acceptance, and Responsibility. Second, coaches' leadership ratings correlated .62 with scores on the leadership regression equation. This provides an additional cross validation of this leadership equation and supports the notion that a stable set of personality traits characterize leaders. Some theoretical implications are discussed.     

Physical Appearance and Leadership: Exploring The Role of Appearance-Based Attribution in Leader Emergence

A study was performed to investigate the role of attribution processes in leader emergence. Photographs of the male and female leaders and nonleaders in a high school senior class were found to elicit different and appropriate attributions of leadership status and related personality traits from naive observers. In addition, separate groups of subjects rated the leaders as more attractive and more maturefaced than the nonleaders. These findings were taken as indicative of the potential importance of schema-based attributions in leader emergence and of the role of appearance cues in the attribution process. The findings have implications for leadership theory, for practical efforts to enhance leader effectiveness, and for research on the identification of personality traits from appearance.     

Perceptions of Femininity in Leadership: Modern Trend or Classic Component?

Recently, leadership theorists have commonly suggested that leaders should demonstrate new, arguably feminine, leadership behaviors. This contrasts with traditional stereotypes of leadership as strictly masculine. However, leadership research has a long history of recognizing two categories of leadership behaviors, initiation of structure and consideration, which appear to reflect stereotypically masculine and feminine behaviors. In the current study, 24 undergraduate volunteers rated traits of purported leaders based solely upon their viewing of the leaders’ faces. These faces were visually impoverished so that the raters had to rely on implicit personality theories of leaders to guide their ratings. The results demonstrate that participants’ ratings of purported leaders’ masculinity and femininity indeed correlate very closely with their ratings of initiation of structure and consideration respectively.     

Personality and anxiety disorders: a review

In this article, we summarize research on how normal personality and personality disorder traits may relate to anxiety disorders as predisposing factors, complications, and results of common underlying etiologies. We outline important questions and how these may be addressed through future research using genetically informative longitudinal and other designs, including: Are high neuroticism/cluster C personality traits causally related to the development of anxiety disorders? To what extent does the state of having an anxiety disorder influence the assessment of personality traits? Do high neuroticism/personality disorder traits and anxiety disorders co-occur because of shared genetic and environmental determinants? And, do personality disorder traits add to the prediction of anxiety disorders when normal personality traits are taken into account?     

Leader Profiles and Their Effectiveness on Employees’ Outcomes

An underlying premise of the transformational–transactional leadership theory is that different forms of leadership can reside simultaneously within the same individual. This fundamental hypothesis has received scarce attention in the empirical literature. The objectives of this study are thus to examine whether leader profiles combining these leadership forms do exist and to evaluate how these profiles are associated with specific employee attitudes and behaviors. Results obtained from two different samples using cluster analyses revealed six different leader profiles (i.e., superleaders, transactors, moderate leaders, distant-visionary, distant-rewarding, and distant-punitive leaders). Our results showed that these types of leaders differ in terms of employees’ perceptions of trust, justice, and commitment, as well as supervisor-rated in-role and contextual performance. Results and implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Prime Minister Leadership Styles in Foreign Policy Decision-Making: A Framework for Research

Although the institutional contexts of prime ministers in parliamentary democracies and of U.S. presidents are very different, both types of executive leaders influence the decision-making processes through their leadership styles. Leadership style includes how the leaders relate to those around them, how they like to receive information, and how they make up their minds. While there are numerous empirical studies and theoretical frameworks on the leadership styles of U.S. presidents, few studies of prime ministers are concerned with personality and styles of leadership. This paper reviews the literature on U.S. presidential styles and on organizational leadership in order to construct a framework for the study of prime minister leadership styles. Components of the proposed framework are illustrated with examples of British prime ministers and German chancellors. In addition, categories of dependent variables to be explained by leadership style are discussed. I argue that leadership style has the greatest impact on the decision-making process and that although the direct effect of leadership style on foreign policy behavior is less, leadership style indirectly influences foreign policy through the decision-making process.     

高校及教育系统领导干部构念人格特质与岗位胜任性关系

提出构念人格特质概念,采用自编的《领导干部人格特质和岗位胜任性问卷》,对126名优秀高校领导干部和68名优秀教育行政部门领导干部进行意见征询,提取了对胜任高校领导岗位最有影响的30项构念人格特质,获得了上述30个项目的7个公共因素并分别命名为开拓与组织适应性、宜人与合作性、自信与进取性、责任与条理性、稳重与务实性、身心健康与理智性、自制与成熟性,从而揭示高校领导干部构念人格特质与岗位胜任性之间的关系.     

Transformational,transactional, and laissez-faire leadership styles: a meta-analysis comparing women and men

A meta-analysis of 45 studies of transformational, transactional, and laissez-faire leadership styles found that female leaders were more transformational than male leaders and also engaged in more of the contingent reward behaviors that are a component of transactional leadership. Male leaders were generally more likely to manifest the other aspects of transactional leadership (active and passive management by exception) and laissez-faire leadership. Although these differences between male and female leaders were small, the implications of these findings are encouraging for female leadership because other research has established that all of the aspects of leadership style on which women exceeded men relate positively to leaders' effectiveness whereas all of the aspects on which men exceeded women have negative or null relations to effectiveness.     

Value-Based Leadership in Organizations: Balancing Values,Interests, and Power Among Citizens,Workers, and Leaders

The purpose of this article is to introduce a model of value-based leadership. The model is based on tensions among values, interests, and power (VIP); and tensions that take place within and among citizens, workers, and leaders (CWL). The VIP-CWL model describes the forces at play in the promotion of value-based practice and formulates recommendations for value-based leadership. The ability to enact certain values is conditioned by power and personal interests of communities, workers, and leaders of organizations. People experience internal conflicts related to VIP as well as external conflicts related to disagreements with the CWL. Value-based practice is predicated on the ability to alleviate these tensions. Leaders have 4 main roles in promoting value-based practice: (a) clarify values, (b) promote personal harmony among VIP, (c) enhance congruence of VIP among CWL, and (d) confront people and groups subverting values or abusing power to promote personal interests.     

Five-factor model of personality and transformational leadership

This study linked traits from the 5-factor model of personality (the Big 5) to transformational leadership behavior. Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to Experience, and Agreeableness were hypothesized to predict transformational leadership. Results based on 14 samples of leaders from over 200 organizations revealed that Extraversion and Agreeableness positively predicted transformational leadership; Openness to Experience was positively correlated with transformational leadership, but its effect disappeared once the influence of the other traits was controlled. Neuroticism and Conscientiousness were unrelated to transformational leadership. Results further indicated that specific facets of the Big 5 traits predicted transformational leadership less well than the general constructs. Finally, transformational leadership behavior predicted a number of outcomes reflecting leader effectiveness, controlling for the effect of transactional leadership.     

Opinion leadership types or continuous opinion leadership traits?

Opinion leadership is typically conceptualised as a continuous personality trait. However, many authors adhere to the view of qualitatively different opinion leadership types and apply arbitrary criteria to split continuous trait scores into two groups (i.e., opinion leaders vs. non‐leaders). The present study is the first to empirically evaluate this approach. A sample of N = 3812 adults (67% women) was administered a validated opinion leadership scale. Finite mixture models examined whether the latent trait distribution can be represented by a set of discrete trait levels that reflected distinct opinion leadership types. The results did not give support to a discrete typology that distinguished leaders from non‐leaders. Rather, opinion leadership was best characterised as a continuous trait.     

Individual Differences in Leadership Emergence: Integrating Meta‐Analytic Findings and Behavioral Genetics Estimates

This paper investigates the extent to which differences in the likelihood of emerging as leaders are explained by genetic differences between individuals. Results indicated that approximately 17% of the variance in the latent construct of leadership emergence is explained by genetic effects that are mediated by intelligence and the Big Five personality traits. Because intelligence and the Big Five do not mediate all genetic influences on leadership emergence (other genetically‐influenced personal characteristics, such as height and attractiveness, are likely to mediate genetic effects on leadership emergence), the heritability estimate obtained in this study represents a lower‐bound estimate of the genetic influences on leadership emergence.     

Personality traits in leadership behavior

Correlational analyses of the personality traits measured by the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R; Costa & McCrae, 1992) and three leadership styles, that is, Change, Production, and Employee (CPE) measured by Ekvall and Arvonen's (1991) CPE questionnaire, were performed. The sample was 106 Norwegian leaders. Three common factors comprising leadership styles and personality domains were interpreted as "looking for new possibilities,"hard working," and "dealing with people." Considering personality traits as behavior tendencies in unspecified situational contexts and leadership styles as behavioral tendencies in the leadership context, and due to the self-report nature of the data, it is argued that the factors show consistency in self-perceptions independent of context. The strongest predictors of the CPE total score were Conscientiousness and Extraversion; Openness and Agreeableness were specific predictors of Change and Employee, respectively.     

Indira Gandhi: The Relationship between Personality Profile and Leadership Style

This article explores the relationship between Indira Gandhi's personality profile in the period before she became Prime Minister and her leadership style during the time she was Prime Minister. The instrument for assessing the personality profile was compiled and adapted from criteria for normal personality types and pathological variants. Gandhi emerges as a multifaceted individual with four of her personality scales—the Ambitious, the Reticent, the Contentious, and the Dominating—approaching the level of mildly dysfunctional. A psychodynamic explanation for these patterns was then offered. This study also developed an instrument for evaluating leadership styles in a cabinet system of government and postulated the theoretical links between personality patterns and leadership style profiles. Gandhi's leadership style was then examined and links between personality profile and leadership style explored: In eight of the 10 leadership categories, Indira Gandhi's leadership behavior matched our expectations for the Ambitious, Dominant, and Contentious personality profiles but not the Reticent one. Further discussion focused on the two areas in which personality patterns fell short of predicting leadership style and the possible explanations for this result.     

TRAIT AND BEHAVIORAL THEORIES OF LEADERSHIP: AN INTEGRATION AND META‐ANALYTIC TEST OF THEIR RELATIVE VALIDITY

The leadership literature suffers from a lack of theoretical integration ( Avolio, 2007 , American Psychologist, 62, 25–33). This article addresses that lack of integration by developing an integrative trait‐behavioral model of leadership effectiveness and then examining the relative validity of leader traits (gender, intelligence, personality) and behaviors (transformational‐transactional, initiating structure‐consideration) across 4 leadership effectiveness criteria (leader effectiveness, group performance, follower job satisfaction, satisfaction with leader). Combined, leader traits and behaviors explain a minimum of 31% of the variance in leadership effectiveness criteria. Leader behaviors tend to explain more variance in leadership effectiveness than leader traits, but results indicate that an integrative model where leader behaviors mediate the relationship between leader traits and effectiveness is warranted.     

Self- and other-reports of traits from the five-factor model: relations to personality disorder

The current study used a psychiatric sample (N = 69) to examine: (1) the correspondence between self- and other-reports of general personality, as measured by the Five-Factor Model (FFM; Costa & McCrae, 1990), and personality disorder (PD) traits, as measured by a structured interview, (2) the relations between these two sets of ratings (FFM and PD traits) and consensus ratings of PD and impairment, and (3) the incremental validity of other-rated personality scores. Agreement between raters for the five domains of the FFM ranged from .23 (agreeableness) to .71 (openness); for the PD traits agreement ranged from .37 (avoidant) to .69 (antisocial). At both the domain and facet level, the personality profiles reflected in the correlations between the FFM scores and PD criteria were consistent across raters with the exception of narcissistic PD. Substantial evidence was found for the incremental validity of other-rated personality scores, with these ratings accounting for an additional 8 to 20% of the overall variance in PD features. The other-rated FFM scores also accounted for more variance in consensus ratings of impairment in the domains of romance, work, and social relations.     

The Fortune 500 Companies' Selection Criteria for Promotion to First Level Sales Management: An Empirical Study

Since marketing, and particularly selling activities, determine the sources and size of a company's revenue, factors which vitally affect sales force performance are matters of crucial importance to corporate management.

Predicting how a newly appointed first level sales manager will perform in the new leadership task remains a difficult problem and the determination and use of selection criteria appears not to be clearly defined in the literature. Previous research has identified desirable attributes as selection criteria though typically these are neither ranked in importance nor as attributes that “can be developed later through training/experience” or be “innate to the person selected.” This research focused upon the selection criteria and practices of the Fortune 500 companies in selecting/appointing their first level sales managers. The results revealed that (i) the Fortune 500 human resource managers are in agreement with the findings of previous research with regard to which personality and character traits are crucial pre-requisites to good sales management performance; (ii) a surprisingly small number of firms use psychological batteries/tests or qualified psychologists to measure these traits; and (iii) turnover rates, not due to promotion, among first level sales managers appear to be high.     

Ethical leadership: A social learning perspective for construct development and testing

Leaders should be a key source of ethical guidance for employees. Yet, little empirical research focuses on an ethical dimension of leadership. We propose social learning theory as a theoretical basis for understanding ethical leadership and offer a constitutive definition of the ethical leadership construct. In seven interlocking studies, we investigate the viability and importance of this construct. We develop and test a new instrument to measure ethical leadership, examine the proposed connections of ethical leadership with other constructs in a nomological network, and demonstrate its predictive validity for important employee outcomes. Specifically, ethical leadership is related to consideration behavior, honesty, trust in the leader, interactional fairness, socialized charismatic leadership (as measured by the idealized influence dimension of transformational leadership), and abusive supervision, but is not subsumed by any of these. Finally, ethical leadership predicts outcomes such as perceived effectiveness of leaders, followers’ job satisfaction and dedication, and their willingness to report problems to management.     

Things I've learned about personality from studying political leaders at a distance

Studying the personalities of political leaders requires methods of measuring personality at a distance. One such method is content analysis of speeches, interviews, and other texts. This article reviews the author's research on achievement, affiliation, and power motives of U.S. presidents and other leaders and draws the following conclusions: (1) motivation and personality can be objectively and reliably measured at a distance; (2) personality is complex, consisting of several different elements or kinds of variables (e.g., motives and cognitions as well as traits); (3) personality exists in social contexts, and past social contexts are embodied in personality; (4) political behaviors and outcomes can be predicted from personality, but only in contingent ("if/then") ways.