P ERSONALITY AND L EADERSHIP

The result of the personality debates of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s was that personality had at best a checkered reputation as predictor of work outcomes (see Guion and Gottier, 1965;

Michel 1968; Davis-Blake and Pfeffer, 1989). The early trait studies generally were of two

forms: (a) attempts to identify the traits that differentiated leaders from their followers (the great man theory of leadership), or (b) attempts to identify the traits that characterized successful as opposed to unsuccessful leaders. Neither of these approaches yielded consistent findings, and early and often-cited reviews of the leadership trait literature by Mann (1959) and Stogdill (1948) concluded that personality traits, by themselves, explained little about leadership. One possible explanation of this is that some of the indicators of the abandonment of the trait approach could be found in the wide variability of the trait terms used in the studies that formed the subject of Mann’s (1959) and Stogdill’s (1948) reviews.

Because various labels were ascribed to the same or similar traits, these early reviewers concluded that no trait had been consistently associated with leadership effectiveness, and they understandably offered an explanation of this finding in the form of situational variables.

However, several theorists (e.g. Hogan, Curphy, & Hogan, 1994; Lillibridge & Williams, 1992; Vickers, 1995) have challenged this view. They have proposed that the utility of the trait approach in understanding leadership has been erroneously undervalued. Judge, Bono, Ilies, and Gerhardt (2002) conducted a meta-analytic study of the links between personality, defined in the terms of the FFM, and leadership, in terms of emergence and effectiveness.

They reported the following estimated corrected correlations: (a) Neuroticism, -.24³⁶; (b) Extraversion, .31; (c) Openness, .24; (d) Agreeableness, .08; and (e) Conscientiousness, .28;

with a multiple R, using the five dimensions overall of .48³⁷. For leadership effectiveness, the correlations were; (a) Neuroticism, -.22; (b) Extraversion, .24; (c) Openness, .24; (d) Agreeableness, .21; and (e) Conscientiousness, .16. More recently, Hogan and Holland (2003) confined their investigation and reported the following estimated true validities: (a) Emotional Stability (Neuroticism), .43, (b) Extraversion and Ambition, .34; (c) Agreeableness, .36; (d) Conscientiousness, .36; and (e) Intellect and Openness, .34. What is important with the Hogan and Holland study is that they confined their investigation to one inventory, the Hogan Personnel Inventory (Hogan & Hogan, 1995), rather than trying to

36 Low Neuroticism indicates high Emotional Stability. A negative correlation indicates that a lower level of Neuroticism is positively related to leadership.

37 Leadership effectiveness refers to a leader’s ability to influence subordinates, while leadership emergence is a within-group phenomenon. The multiple R for emergence was .53 and for effectiveness it was .39 (Judge et al., 2002).

combine scales across inventories, and they carefully aligned predictors with relevant criteria.

The study performed by Judge et al. (2002) also reported the relationship between the FFM and Leadership by study setting, see Table 6.2.

Table 6.2

Summary of Meta-Analytic Findings of the Relation Between Personality and Leadership by Study Setting

DOMAIN Business Government/Military Students Neuroticism

Especially worth noting is the low correlation between leadership and Openness in a government or military setting. According to Judge et al. (2002), the student setting is seen as more unstructured, with few rules or formally defined roles; government organizations tend to be relatively bureaucratic; and military organizations, besides being bureaucratic, are also rule oriented. The business setting falls somewhere in between. Research by LePine, Colquitt, & Erez (2000) indicates that that adaptability seems to be a function of Conscientiousness and Openness in situations characterized by sudden changes, novelty, and ambiguity. Those with high Openness made better decisions, and, unexpectedly, those with low Conscientiousness also made better decisions. This revealing effect for Conscientiousness was the trait’s reflecting dependability (i.e., order, dutifulness, and deliberation), rather than volition (i.e., competence, achievement striving, self-discipline).

This strongly indicates the importance of Openness for dealing with conflicts in the 21^st century, but it also provides an argument for a balance between these two important traits.

Openness has been found to be related to creativity and to influence the ability to adapt to change, while Conscientiousness predicts both job and leadership performance.

Agreeableness was found the least relevant of the FFM in the study of Judge et al. (2002), The Hogan and Holland (2003) study and the findings of Mount et al. (1998), however,

underline the importance of Agreeableness. Silverthorne (2001) found in a study comparing leaders from the U.S., the Republic of China (Taiwan), and Thailand that effective managers differ from less effective ones in describing themselves as more extraverted, more agreeable, more conscientious, and less neurotic in all three cultures, and that U.S. managers also described themselves as more open to experience.

There is empirical evidence to demonstrate that situational strength moderates the personality-behavior relation (Barrick & Mount, 1993; Beaty, Cleveland, & Murphy, 2001;

Gellatly & Irving, 2001; Hochwarter, Witt, & Kacmar, 2000). This underscores the fact that we must broadly account for the situational effects to determine whether personality is relevant to behavior and whether those effects extend beyond the requirements of the job.

Studies have also demonstrated the effect of situational strength, rather than personality, by showing that situation can control how an individual behaves. When situations are exceptionally strong (e.g. like. Goffman’s classical description of behavior in the elevator (1963, p. 137-139), or attending a funeral), all individuals tend to behave in the same way regardless of their personality traits. As a natural result, strong situations have been shown to decrease the observed relation between personality and behavior. In contrast, weak situations are characterized by few expectations and many ambiguous demands, and consequently individuals have considerable discretion in how to behave. This is descriptive of the highly political nature of 4^th GW. As a result, the validity of personality traits in predicting performance has been found to be larger than when the situation is characterized as “weak”

rather than “strong.” The important factor to consider here is discretion (Kaiser and Hogan, 2006), which will be discussed in section 6.8.