MGMT3021 Leadership

Week 2
Traits, Motives and Characteristics of Leaders

The Trait Approach to Understanding Effective Leadership

What are traits?

Individual attributes:
- Personality traits and temperament – relatively stable
- Needs and motives – physiological and social
- Values – attitudes about what is right and wrong
- Skills – abilities (environment +inherited)
o Can be born with or developed through experience and learning
- Competency – combination e.g. emotional intelligence

Heredity and Environment

- Personality traits and mental ability – largely inherited predispositions that require
right opportunity to develop e.g. cognitive intelligence
- Neuroscience
o Leaders need to adapt
o Integrated brain – mostly genetic, although can be enhanced through training

Personality Traits, Motives, Values and Effective Leadership

- High energy level and stress tolerance

- Internal locus of control
- Emotional maturity
- Personal integrity
- Socialized power motivation
- Achievement orientation (mod. high)
- Self-confidence (mod. high)
- Need to for affiliation (mod. low)

Definitions

- Conscientiousness: reflects the extent to which a person is dependable, dutiful, and

achievement-oriented, and is often associated with deliberate planning and
structure
- Extraversion: individuals who prefer to be around people more than being alone
- Agreeableness: optimistic, sympathetic, need for affiliation
The traits and characteristics that are in italics had enough data and study available to
conduct a meta-analysis

- Minimum of 31% can be attributed to traits

- Need integrated model that consider other things than traits

Key findings relevant to traits

- Conscientiousness, extraversion, and agreeableness are important predictors of

success in leadership position
- Conscientiousness and extraversion => more likely to be evaluated as effective
leaders
- Conscientiousness and agreeableness => improve group performance
- Gender DOES NOT predict leader effectiveness

Narcissistic Leadership

- Narcissistic leadership occurs when leaders’ actions are principally motivated by

their own egomaniacal needs and beliefs, superseding the needs and interests of the
constituents and institutions they lead
- Fantasies about success and power
- Seek attention and admiration of others

- Narcissist leaders have low on Honesty-Humility, emotionality, agreeableness and

conscientiousness
Leadership literature only refer to leaders as having narcissistic characterizes but cannot
diagnose someone with narcissism as this is up to phycology professionals

Narcissism

A person who has an excessive interest in or admiration of themselves. Dimensions:

- Grandiose sense of self-importance
- Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success or power
- Belief in “special” or unique status (including fixation on associating with high-status
people or institutions)
- Requirement for excessive admiration
- Unreasonable sense and expectations of entitlement
- Interpersonal exploitativeness
- Lack of empathy
- Envy
- Arrogant behavior or attitudes

Narcissism and Leadership Implications

- More likely to emerge as leaders

- Judge, LePine and Rich study – Narcissism leads to:
o Enhanced self-ratings of leadership
o Workplace deviance
o Reduced contextual performance – behaviors that foster a positive social ad
psychological climate e.g. being courteous and respectful to peers
o Reduced task performance – behaviors that are generally recognized as part
of the job and directly contribute to the organizations technical core

Good outcomes of narcissist leaders

- Motivation and confidence as they truly believe in the cause and are good
motivators

Skills and Effective Leadership

Leadership skills

- Technical
- Conceptual
- Interpersonal
This graph indicates that workers with lower positions have more technical skills as they are
deemed more important, however, as a leader increase to middles managers and CEO the
technical skills become less important as they rise on the hierarchy of the organization and
conceptual and interpersonal skills are more important.

Those who are promoted based on their technical skill often find it difficult to step away
from the technical side and emerge in the conceptual and interpersonal area.

Emotional Intelligence

The ability to perceive emotions, to access and generate emotions so as to assist thought, to
understand and emotions and emotional knowledge, and to reflectively regulate emotions
so as to promote emotional and intellectual growth

- Perceive emotion - perceive and analyze why the individual is feeling the specific
way
- Generate emotion - understand the range of emotions that individuals experience in
themselves and in others;
- Regulate emotion- able to talk about and regulate emotions to maintain good
relationship

Emotions

- Essential part of the way humans operate

Basic emotions
- Anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, surprise
- Amusement, contempt, contentment, embarrassment, excitement, guilt, pride in
achievement, relief, satisfaction, sensory pleasure, shame
Emotional intelligence

- Popularized by Daniel Goleman

- Distinct from, but positively related to, other intelligence
- An individual difference, where some people are more endowed and others are less
- Develop over a person’s life span and can be enhanced through training
- Involves, at least in part, a person’s abilities to identify and to perceive emotion (in
self and others), as well as possession of the skills to understands and to manage
those emotions successfully

Mayer and Salovey 1997

1. Emotional perception – self-aware of emotions and able to express emotions and

emotional needs accurately to others

2. Emotional assimilation – distinguish among the different emotions and priorities

those that are influencing thought process i.e. are emotions reasonable given the
situation?

3. Emotional understanding – understand complex emotions (self and others)

4. Emotion management – regulate emotions, may involve disconnecting from the

emotion

EI and leadership outcomes

- Intuitively – enhanced relationships, problem solving ability, time management

- However, limited research to support a relationship between EI and leadership
effectiveness

EI and leadership effectiveness – critics

- Methodological concerns
- General mental ability is more important for effective leadership
- IQ Big 5 and gender predicts EQ
- Scholars argue that EI failed to predict variance in performance measures beyond
the variance predicted by IQ
 Evaluation of Trait Approach

Strengths

- Leaders do not have to be great men or women by being intellectual geniuses or

omniscient prophets to success. But they do need to have the right staff and this
stuff is not equally present in all people
- Important guide for selection decisions e.g. integrity, high energy, stress tolerance
- Can guide development efforts

Limitations

- Other variables – situation? Influencing process?

- How much of a trait is the right amount?
- Too much focus can build an elitist conception of leadership
- In reality, effective leaders are outstanding in some characteristics but low on others
- Some leaders may be convinced that they must be strong on one trait at the
exclusion of its opposite e.g. extraversion/ Introversion

To conclude

- Traits matter but they are only a part of the story

- Helpful to guide leader selection and development
- Lots of limitations – specially on how traits relate to other variables