Analyzing Leadership Traits
Kirkpatrick and Locke found six primary leadership attributes that distinguished leaders from non-leaders in their review, which were drive, honesty/integrity, cognitive capacity, the desire to lead, self-confidence, and business expertise (49). The authors also emphasized the need of charisma, inventiveness, and adaptability in leadership.
The urge to lead allows an individual to influence others in the proper way, such as achieving business goals while taking on responsibilities. Being honest, the leader will act truthfully and integrity will make him uphold strong moral principles and ethics, thereby doing the right things in reliable ways. The trait of self-confidence enables the leader to approach difficult situations, take a given course of action with determination, make the right decisions, and gains others' trust. The cognitive ability is concerned with an individual's intelligence. The leader must collect and integrate information for suitable strategy formulation, problem solving, and proper decision making. The business knowledge implies that the leader is well conversant with the firm, industry and the economy. Finally, the drive propels a person to remain goal-oriented and ambitious, and with a lot of vigor.
Methods and Procedures of Personality and Leadership Study
Judge, Ilies, Bono, and Gerhardt (2002) perform a literature review to understand the traits tied to leadership. What were the methods and procedures of this review, and what is the reasoning behind them?
In their study of personality and leadership, Judge, Bono and Ilies performed a qualitative review by searching for the relevant literature from various credible sources, including the PsycINFO database (electronic search), and manual search to retrieve quality journals such as the leadership quarterly and doctoral dissertations (769). Then, the meta-analysis procedures followed. The five-factor model was used by the authors as the organizing framework for meta-analyzing the correlations from the selected samples. The authors used the meta-analysis to investigate the association between the Big Five traits to the leadership (neuroticism, conscientiousness, extraversion, openness, and agreeableness) and a possible linkage with personality.
Personality Traits and Leadership
Extraversion is a personality trait that shows whether someone is shy or outgoing. Extraversion implies that leaders have the tendency to be sociable, positive emotions and have energy (Virkus). This trait has been considered the strongest predictor of an individual who becomes a leader and an effective one, an issue proved by Judge, Ilies, Bono, and Gerhardt in their study.
Conscientiousness is a personality trait that distinguishes an outstanding leader from non-leaders. It is where an individual acts dutifully, exhibits self-discipline, and is goal-oriented (Virkus). This trait is good for a leader as he is able to remain consistent, strategic, and creative.
Openness to experience is an inborn virtue and relates to intellect and imagination. This trait indicates the willingness of a person to learn new as well as creative ways of handling issues. It correlates with divergent thinking, and has a strong relationship with personality and behavior-based measures of creativity, an effective element of an effective leader (Judge, Bono and Ilies 768).
The neuroticism trait is characterized by the tendency to experience unpleasant emotions, including depression, anger, or vulnerability (Virkus). A leader should show high levels of stability and resilience in their emotional feelings. In their review, Judge, Ilies, Bono, and Gerhardt established that neuroticism was negatively linked to leadership.
Agreeableness is where the leaders are expected to be friendly and decisive to value adding ideas. As a leadership trait, agreeableness enables a leader to express kindness to the actions and ideas of others even where they are not the best.
Findings of Geershenoff and Foti
A summary of Geershenoff and Foti's Findings
Geershenoff and Foti's study was influenced by the existing literature, which showed that leadership emergence was born from a consensual agreement among the group members that one of them became their leader. They, therefore, assessed the role of gender and intelligence on the emergence of leadership using a pattern technique and manipulating the task type. The authors engaged 200 female students and grouped them on the basis of androgyny, femininity, and masculinity and grouped them into four. Their findings were that during the initiation-structure assignment, both the masculine-intelligent and bisexual-intelligent people emerged more than the feminine-intelligent ones (Gershenoff and Foti 188). In the condition of the consensus-building task, there were no notable differences in emergence of leaders among the individuals in various groups. However, leadership emergence in the androgynous-intelligent individual was partly noted.
Works Cited
Gershenoff, Amy B. and Roseanne J. Foti. "Leader emergence and gender roles in all-female groups." Small Group Research, Vol. 34 (2) (2003): 170-196.
Judge, Timothy A., et al. "Personality and leadership: A qualitative and quantitative." Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 87 (4) (2002): 765-780.
Kirkpatrick, Shelley A. and Edwin A. Locke. "Leadership: Do traits matter?" Academy of Management Executive, Vol. 5 (2) (1991): 48-60.
Virkus, Sirje. Five-factor personality model. 2009. http://www.tlu.ee/~sirvir/IKM/Leadership%20Attributes/fivefactor_personality_model.html, Accessed 28 January 2017
