The Relationship between Personality and Leadership

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing most businesses today is how do you identify and select great leaders? I have always found it curious how businesses invest millions in the assessment and development of talent, only to appoint a new CEO or executive team member after nothing more than a couple of interviews and a bland reference.

So what do you look for when selecting a new leader? Northouse, (2010, pp 15-109) discusses four specific approaches/models of what makes a successful leader. They are the trait approach, the skills approach, the style approach, and the situational approach.

A key question in the identification of great leaders is the relationship between personality and leadership.

The Value of Personality

Hogan & Kaiser (2005) define leadership as being about the performance of groups / teams. They argue that measuring personality is a valid predictor of leadership capability, when looked at from two perspectives, firstly how you think about yourself, and secondly, how others think about you, (Reputation).

The two aspects of reputation they identify are the bright side, or when our social performance is at its best (In interview for example), and the dark side, which reflects the impression you make when you are off guard, or at your worst.

The behaviours or tendencies you display in the dark side tend to be concealed by well practiced social skills, but over a longer time period, for instance in a work/career scenario, the dark side will negatively impact relationships with others.
Many well practiced and refined candidates perform well in interview, using their social skills to mask their true behaviour as a leader.

The use of a trait model, where certain personality characteristics are seen as predictors or indicators of good leadership, are able to give a below the surface profile of a potential leader, and provider sign posts to potential problems.

Hogan & Kaiser (2005) make the important connection between personality and organisational performance through the importance of leadership style (Shaped by personality) shaping employee attitudes and the effective functioning of the team, which subsequently drives, or hinders, organisational effectiveness.

Where personality is shaped in are younger years, and therefore less developable during are adult years, the skills approach focuses on the skills and knowledge required by a leader to be successful. (Northouse 2010 chapter 3)

The skills approach uses 3 skill areas, technical, human and conceptual and postulates that leadership ability is trainable. That is not to say that the skills model completely excludes the importance of personality as one of the three components of the skills model involves personal attributes which includes personality, cognitive ability and motivation.

The style approach to leadership emphasises the importance of behaviour, which is different from the personal characteristics approach of personality based models such as the trait approach. A big question of course is can leaders behave in a way that contradicts their natural characteristics or personality? Perhaps in the short term, but on an ongoing basis?

Using a tool such as the leadership grid appears to me to oversimplify the behaviours of leadership and shows little connection between the model of style and business performance. What good is a model, if it lacks predictive capabilities? Likewise who is to say that there is a certain style of leadership most suited to a specific situation!

Situational leadership recognises that certain leaders are more successful in certain situations and espouses the need for leaders to flex and adapt their style to match the situation. Leadership style within a situational model of leadership focuses on the two spectrums of support and direction, and requires behaviour to be adapted across both.

Conclusion

When you look at some of the underpinning drivers of leadership approaches such as style, situation, and skill, I would argue that personality plays an important part.

My issue with all these models, including the trait model, is that for all the research and academic debate that has gone on over the last half century, why are we still so poor at predicting leadership success?

Perhaps leadership of more of an art than a science and therefore the factors of success are less definable than we may wish for.

I have spent many years using personality measurement within the context of picking current and future leaders and would argue that the trait approach can be a useful tool in identifying who will not be successful in a leadership role. However, using an endless list of traits, based on some theoretical model of leadership, is in my experience pointless.

Using the big five however, (Myers 2007, pp618 -620) and being clear regarding the consequences of an individual’s profile on the role you are looking to fill can be a valuable process to undertake.

For me, businesses spend too much time looking to select people into a role and not enough focus on selecting people out of a role. In other words, identify those key characteristics, such as emotional instability, low drive, and a lack of conscientiousness, that should exclude a candidate from a process, and then consider their skills, style, and ability to adapt to different situations to inform your choice.

I used to work for a privately owned business that used an external assessment company to conduct a personality, cognitive and situational leadership assessment on every managerial candidate for a leadership role. Occasionally the business would make an appointment against the advice of the assessment, and in every case 18 months down the line issues would have arisen directly in line with the concerns the assessment report suggested. The lesson for me from this was that personality, when measure along with intellect, skills, and situational capability, makes an invaluable contribution to selection decisions.

A final though on this subject is the difference between Abell’s (2006) approach to linking leadership with strategy, a forward looking approach, and the immobility of approaches such as the skills approach, which appear more focused on management tasks rather than the leadership of future success. I would argue that this gives more support to the idea of using a personality based approach, such as that proposed by Hogan & Kaiser (2005), looking for that magic ingredient of leader who can transform the organisation, and more importantly transform the hearts and minds of the workforce.

References

Abell, D.F. (2006) ‘The future of strategy is leadership’, Journal of Business Research 59 (3), pp. 310–314, Science Direct [Online]. DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2005.09.003 (Accessed: 14th May 2010).
Hogan, R., & Kaiser, R.B. (2005) ‘What we know about leadership’, Review of General Psychology 9 (2), pp. 169–180, PsycArticles [Online]. DOI: 10.1037/1089-2680.9.2.169 (Accessed: 15th May 2010).
Myers, D (2007) Psychology, 8th Edition. New York, NY. Worth Publishing
Northouse, P.G. (2010) Leadership: Theory and practice 4th ed. London: Sage.

Charismatic Leadership and its impact on Performance

Would you class Nelson Mandela as a charismatic leader? He transformed his country and bought racially divided groups closer together, yet his political speeches lasted for hours and were often incoherent.

How about Winston Churchill? This was a man who was able to bring the British people together to fight Nazism, yet was hardly ever seen in public, every speech he gave was extensively rehearsed, and he spent most of the day intoxicated through the excessive consumption of champagne, claret and brandy!

How about Robert Mugabe, he bought two tribal factions together to oust white rule and has followed a policy of redistributing land and wealth to veterans of the war of independence, yet has seen his country become one of the most poverty stricken on earth?

So who is the charismatic leader and how has this impacted the performance of his team?

The attraction of a Charismatic Leader

The research into transformational and charismatic leadership suggests a high level of attraction to charismatic leaders through an appeal of common values and ideals. Transformational leadership consists of four distinct dimensions:

• Idealised Influence (Charisma)
• Inspirational Motivation
• Intellectual Stimulation
• Individualised consideration

In this model charisma is only a component of transformational leadership whilst we can argue that they are either one in the same, or that charismatic leadership is the primary driver of successful leadership.

House (1976) model of charismatic leadership was based around four personality characteristics

• Dominant
• Desire to Influence
• Self-Confident
• Strong Moral Values

Within charismatic leaders these personality characteristics lead on to certain behaviours which then have an effect on followers.

Key amongst these displayed behaviours are acting as a strong role model of the values and beliefs they want to see their follower adopt, an air of competence, they articulate morale goals, they communicate high expectations of followers and display confidence that they will be achieved, and finally they arouse a task level motivation amongst their followers.

I would argue that it is this arousal within followers of a desire to deliver that makes charismatic leaders sought after by their followers.

The affective influence processes followed by charismatic leaders are based on creating positive emotions within both themselves and their followers, and therefore it is this emotional engagement that connects followers with their leaders. Charismatic leaders use powerful emotions to arouse similar feelings in their followers.

Does Charismatic Leadership equal improved performance?

The argument for improving performance through charismatic leadership is based on the idea of building an emotional contract of engagement that uses positive emotions to motivate followers into conducting work based tasks more effectively. Having a clearly communicated vision is a key aspect of charismatic leadership and the importance of this is echoed by Abel (2006) who links effective leadership with Strategy, an important component of which is a clear vision.

However, an argument around charismatic leadership is the collective will being placed above individual gain to achieve a common vision built by a charismatic leader, leading to higher performance.

This argument appears to be a contradiction to the work of Houghton & Yoho (2005) whose contingent model of leadership is based around self-leadership through psychological empowerment. Can you have self leadership and charismatic leadership side by side?

With charismatic leadership drawing its roots from personality, where is the consideration of what Hogan & Kaiser (2005) would refer to as the dark side or the consequence of this personality based approach to leadership. Whilst Ilies et al (2006) may be happy to dismiss some of the most hated dictators in history as pseudo-charismatic leaders, in it for themselves rather than real charismatic leaders who have a powerful morale core, I don’t buy the concept of selfless leaders in the commercial business world.

Whether it be ego, greed, pride, vanity, or the call of a greater good, leadership that strives to focus followers on a perhaps unquestioned delivery of a goal or purpose are replacing individual ownership of self performance with a personality based follower process that often, in the commercial world leads eventually to the moral corruption of a business, such as WorldCom, Lehman Brothers, Maxwell group, Northern Rock etc.

Conclusion

I have always enjoyed working for a charismatic leader who provides a compelling sense of purpose and rallies the troops to a common cause. But modern leadership is surely about the inclusion of a flexible contribution from a diverse and talented group of individuals.

The nature of the relationship between organisation and employee has also moved from a relationship based psychological contract to a transactional based psychological contract, which again in my view undermines the effectiveness of charismatic leadership.

A final thought that comes to mind is if charismatic leadership was the secret to organisational performance, why do shareholders not demand this in their leaders of businesses? Are there not more grey suited accountants running businesses in the FTSE 100 than there are charismatic leaders?

Mandela, Churchill & Mugabe were all, I would suggest, Charismatic leaders, at least in the eyes of their followers, for as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, perhaps charisma is in the eye of the follower!

References
Abell, D.F. (2006) ‘The future of strategy is leadership’, Journal of Business Research 59 (3), pp. 310–314, Science Direct [Online]. DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2005.09.003 (Accessed: 28th May 2010).
Hogan, R., & Kaiser, R.B. (2005) ‘What we know about leadership’, Review of General Psychology 9 (2), pp. 169–180, PsycArticles [Online]. DOI: 10.1037/1089-2680.9.2.169 (Accessed: 28th May 2010).
Houghton, J.D., & Yoho, S.K. (2005) ‘Toward a Contingency Model of Leadership and Psychological Empowerment: When Should Self-Leadership Be Encouraged?’, Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 11 (4), pp. 65–83, Sage Journals [Online]. DOI: 10.1177/107179190501100406 (Accessed: 28th May 2010).
Ilies, R., Judge, T., & Wagner, D. (2006) ‘Making sense of motivational leadership: The trail from transformational leaders to motivated followers’, Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 13 (1), pp. 1–22, Sage Journals [Online]. DOI: 10.1177/10717919070130010301 (Accessed: 28th Mat 2010).
Northouse, P.G. (2010) Leadership: Theory and practice 4th ed. London: Sage.
Pilbeam, S. & Corbridge, M. (2006) People Resourcing: Contemporary HRM In Practice. 3rd Edition. London. Prentice Hall International

The Future of Strategy is leadership

The environment in which businesses must survive has been under rapid transformation since the start of the post-bureaucratic age commenced in the 1980's.

The transformation of the globalising economy has created a knowledge rich society, new technologies and Hypercompetition between firms across international boundaries.
This new era of globalisation has demanded a new cadre of leadership to deliver sustainable success in businesses operating in increasingly competitive markets. In most cases this means enhancing the wealth of the shareholders.

The volatile and ever changing business environment demands leaders who are able to pre-empt the future. In other words shift their focus from today’s performance to tomorrows potential. However achieving this without losing a grip on today’s performance is an ever present challenge.

Abel, D (2006) argues that strategy and leadership have converged into the same, and proposes 6 strategic leadership tasks as the priorities for new Leaders.

• The Duality of strategy focusing on today’s performance and tomorrows potential
• Vision, Mission, and Distinctive Profile become more important than Strategy
• Strategy balanced between resources, future opportunity, leadership purpose and leadership responsibility
• Strategy balancing the external changing world with the internal functional activities and business systems
• Leveraging systems as competitive advantage, such as supply chain
• Decentralising strategy-making from corporate centres to divisions and individuals.

The challenge of this approach to leadership is how it fits in a business environment that is facing a fight for survival. However, it is through this focus on future challenges and opportunities that will define the great business leaders of our era.

Defining Strategy and Leadership as one and the same perhaps does not recognise the multi faceted aspect of leadership in diverse settings in organisations. Whilst the important role of strategic planning, beyond extending the annual budget in to 3 or 5 year budgets, is difficult to deny, and that it must demand the close attention of business leaders, are strategy and leadership one in the same?