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Chapter
7
Leadership Traits
“Successful leaders share three abilities. The first
is the ability to get along with others and build
teams. Another is the ability to make sound and
timely decisions. And the third is the ability to get
things done. Unfortunately, only a relatively small
percentage of leaders possess all three of these
attributes.”
~ Gordy Curphy, Curphy Consulting Corporation
McGraw-Hill/Irwin
copyright © 2009 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, inc. All Rights Reserved
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Great Man Theory
• The Great Man Theory attempted to
prove that leaders and followers are
fundamentally different.
• Conclusions of the research:
– Leaders were not qualitatively different
than followers.
– Intelligence, initiative, stress tolerance,
responsibility, friendliness, and
dominance, were moderately related to
leadership success.
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Personality Traits and Leadership
• Personality: Is the impression a person
makes on others.
– Underlying, unseen structures and processes
inside a person that explain why we behave the
way we do.
• Trait approach: Traits refer to recurring
regularities or trends in a person’s
behavior.
– Theory maintains that people behave the way
they do because of the strengths of the traits
they possess.
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Personality Traits and Leadership
(continued)
• Personality traits are useful for explaining
why people act fairly consistently in
different situations.
• Knowing differences in personality traits can
help predict more accurately how people
will tend to act in different situations.
• Leader behavior reflects an interaction
between personality traits and various
situational factors:
– Weak situations
– Strong situations
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The Five Factor Model of Personality
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Implications of the Five Factor
Model
• Provides an explanation for leaders’ and
followers’ tendencies to act in consistent
ways over time.
• Behavioral manifestations of personality
traits are often exhibited automatically and
unconsciously.
• The Five factor model:
– Is used by many researchers in some form.
– Is a useful method for profiling leaders.
– Appears to be universally applicable across
cultures.
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Implications of the Five Factor
Model (continued)
• Personality traits:
– Can be reliably categorized into the five major
dimensions of the FFM.
– Are good measures of leadership potential.
– Can be used to make predictions about typical
behavior at work.
– Tend to be difficult to change – People are “hard
wired”.
– People tend to describe others using traitlike
terms.
– All behavior is under conscious control.
– Insight into personality traits provides much
information.
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The Building Blocks Of Skills
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Leadership Potential Profile
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Why Do Some Leaders Fail?
• Base rate of managerial incompetence may
be as high as 75 percent.
• Reasons for high level of incompetence include:
– Invalid selection and succession planning
systems.
– Ill-defined performance expectations.
– Poorly designed leadership development
programs.
• Dark-side personality traits: Irritating, counterproductive behavioral tendencies that interfere
with a leader’s ability to build cohesive teams.
– Cause followers to exert less effort toward goal
accomplishment.
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Dark-Side Personality Traits
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Leadership Challenge Profile
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Intelligence and Leadership
• Intelligence: A person’s all-around
effectiveness in activities directed by
thought.
• Intelligent leaders:
– Are faster learners.
– Make better assumptions, deductions, and
inferences.
– Are better at creating a compelling vision and
strategizing to make their vision a reality.
– Can develop better solutions to problems.
– Can see more of the primary and secondary
implications of their decisions.
– Are quicker on their feet than leaders who are
less intelligent.
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The Building Blocks Of Skills
7-15
The Triarchic Theory of Intelligence
• The theory focuses on what a leader
does when solving complex mental
problems.
• The Triarchic Theory of Intelligence
consists of:
– Analytic intelligence
– Practical intelligence
– Creative intelligence
• Divergent thinking
• Convergent thinking
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The Components of Creative
Intelligence
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Implications of the Triarchic Theory
of Intelligence
• Leadership effectiveness or emergence is
positively correlated with analytic
intelligence.
• Sometimes, personality is much more
predictive of leadership emergence and
effectiveness than analytic intelligence.
• In certain cases, analytic intelligence may
have a curvilinear relationship with
leadership effectiveness.
• Leaders’ primary role is to build an
environment where others can be creative.
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Improving Organizational Creativity
• Leaders should be mindful that:
– Various sorts of incentives or rewards can have
various effects on creativity.
– Synthetic abilities can be hindered if ideas will be
evaluated.
– In order to develop new products and services,
the level of turnover should be low, and goals
should be clear.
– Creeping elegance should be avoided.
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Creativity Killers: How to Squelch
the Creativity of Direct Reports
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Intelligence and Stress: Cognitive
Resources Theory
• Cognitive resources theory: A conceptual
scheme for explaining how leader behavior
changes under stress levels to impact group
performance.
• Key concepts of theory include:
– Intelligence, experience, stress, group
performance.
• Theory predictions include:
– Greater experience but lower intelligence may
account for higher-performing groups in high stress
conditions.
– High levels of experience may account for usage of
old solutions when creative solutions are more apt.
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Cognitive Resource Theory
(continued)
• Problems concerning CRT:
– Apparent dichotomy between intelligence and
experience.
– Leader’s ability to tolerate stress.
– Correlation between dark-side traits and stress.
• Implications of CRT:
– The best leaders are often smart and
experienced.
– Leaders may be unaware of the degree to which
they are causing stress in their followers.
– Level of stress inherent in the position needs to
be understood before selection of leaders.
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Ability and Mixed Models of Emotional
Intelligence
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Comparison between the FFM and
Goleman’s Model of EQ
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Implications of Emotional
Intelligence
• Most researchers agree that EQ can be
developed.
• People can be extremely ineffective when their
thoughts, feelings, and actions are misaligned.
• Noncognitive abilities can play important roles
in leadership success.
• It has helped bring emotion back to the
workplace.
• Research indicates that EQ moderates
employees’ reactions to job insecurity and their
coping ability toward job-loss related stress.
• It appears that EQ attributes would be difficult
to change as a result of training intervention.
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Emotional Intelligence And The Building
Blocks Of Skills
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Summary
• A relationship exists between personality,
intelligence, and emotional intelligence and the
ability to build teams and get results.
• The term personality has many different
meanings, but we use the term to describe
one’s characteristic patterns of behavior.
• The Five Factor Model comprises the bright
side of personality, but many traits also
contribute to the dark side of personality.
• Analytic intelligence, practical intelligence, and
creative intelligence theories help in
understanding intelligence.
• Emotional intelligence in leaders is said to make
them more effective.
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