Trait theory

When first talking about leadership, we're usually talking about the trait
theory, although we often do not think about it in these terms. It's main idea
is that leaders have certain traits that makes them leaders. For example
Churchill is a 'persistent' leader when fighting against the Nazis or Mandela is
'visionary' leader about the black civil rights. So the raitionale goes that
leadership can be identified or even defined if individuals exhibits these so
called leadership traits. However, the problem is after extensive research by
Stogdill in 1948, he reached the conclusion that there is no single set of
universal traits that is predictative of leadership (cited in Northouse 2004). In
another word, we couldnt possibly predict if anyone is going to grow up to
become a leader by testing if he has got all the leadership traits (presumably
through psychological assessment) because there is nothing to benchmark
him against. The second important conclusion is that leadership arise from a
need for it (situation) and it invovles interaction with other people. All these
suggests trait theory cannot be the only way to study leadership. Fortunately,
after a period where it was almost discarded , recent research have shown
traits theory is important for understanding effective leadership (Northhouse
2004). There are still a set of traits that are consistently found in leaders such
as intelligence, determination, integrity, sociability, and self confidence
(Northouse 2004). Nevertheless, when we think about leadership in more
depth, we would realise when we think about leadership we think about
things such as what leaders do, what they say, how they influence people
and these are the behavioural things that have little association with
individual traits. Not surprisingly, one major limit of trait theory is that it is
impossible to see how traits such as intelligence and determination can bring
about influence in other people's motivation and performance (Maurik 2001).