Frontiers in Leadership Research VT-08 Karolinska Institutet Department of Learning, Informatics, Management & Ethics (LIME) Medical Management

Centre (MMC)

Sofia Sjberg

What do we know about traits predicting leader emergence and leader effectiveness?
Purpose The purpose of this essay is to make a review of the leadership and trait research. The two areas of research seems to have drifted apart in some way from the 60s and 70s when trait research was under heavy criticism. Leadership and traits To get a simple overview of how, in what way and to what extent, different leadership behaviors influence different criteria such as health outcomes, economy and general job performance is not easy. Nor is it easy to orient oneself among the vast literature written about leadership. But the fact that leadership as a phenomenon, leaders and their behaviour, affects both the individual in the leading position, the subordinates, organizations, peers and family members has quite large empirical support (e.g. Gilbreath & Benson, 2004; Sy, Cote, Saavedra, 2005; Hjlm, Kentt, Hassmn & Gustafsson, 2007; Giges, Petitpas, Vernacchia, 2004). The extensive consequences of leadership behavior makes it highly interesting and important to study variables that might predict leadership behavior. The amount of definitions of the concept of leadership are as many as the amount of other terms of this phenomenon; management, supervision and coaching are three examples. This is manifested in the table that Yukl (2005) offers presenting at least 10 definitions of leadership with the oldest definition formulated in 1957 and the latest dated to 1999. Anyhow, most empirical studies define leadership in terms of leader emergence the person in a group of strangers who exerts the most influence and will be perceived as leaderlike(standing out), or effectiveness that concerns others judgement of a persons performance as a leader (approval). These criteria will be used in this review in spite of its shortcomings and insufficiency to generate full understanding of leadership as a phenomenon including the relationship between traits and leadership. Is personality important? Personality has had at best a checkered reputation as a predictor of work outcomes. Mostly, personality has been roughly criticized as an ineffective predictor of work performance in

general, starting with Guion & Gottier (1965) and Mischel (1968). This critique was at the time well-motivated but recent advancements in research methods has led to a bigger understanding of the structure of personality and improved ways of assessing personality constructs. These advancements has according to Hogan and Kaiser (2005) been ignored in leadership research despite the evidence that personality has effects on leadership. As Zaccaro, Foti, and Kenny (1991) noted, trait explanations of leader emergence are generally regarded with little esteem by leadership theorists and this is even today very true reading a statements such as; Hundreds of studies show no relationship between personality traits and leadership (Bergsten, 2008) and refers to Yukl (1998). Yukl is still, in his 2006 edition, healthy sceptical towards personality but admits that: Reviews and meta-analyses of studies on the five factors find that most of them are related to leader emergence or effectiveness (p. 197) referring to the study by Judge, Bono, Ilies and Gerhard published in 2002. Barrick and Mount (2005) takes it a bit further claiming that there is overwhelming evidence that personality traits is positively related to performance at work including the work performance for executives. So, does personality matter, and if so, to what extent and in what way? To start with, the Big Five traits are the theoretical framework that has led to a more systematic and understandable research on personality and its correlates. It is also the model that is used in most empirical research assessing personality and will also be the framework in this review. The Big Five or five factor model consists of the following five dimensions or factors (Costa & McCrae, 1985): Neuroticism (High level; anxious, hostile, personally insecure, depressed. Low level; emotionally stable, calm, relaxed, handles stress without problem.) Extraversion (High level; sociable, assertive, active, talkative. Low level; reserved, independent, even paced.) Openness (High level; active imagination, attentiveness to inner feelings, intellectual curiosity, independence of judgement. Low level; conventional, conservative) Agreeableness (High level; altruistic, helpful, warm, compliant, modest. Low level; disagreeable, antagonistic, sceptical, critical.) Conscientousness (High level; competent, dutiful self-disciplined, well organized, Low level; careless, irresponsible, lazy, impulsive, low in achievement striving.) The brief descriptions are not to be interpreted as if the constructs themselves are so recklessly reduced. The meta-analytic correlations between emergence and effectiveness respectively, with separate traits are presented in table 1. Table 1 Relationship (corrected correlation) between Big Five traits and leader emergence and leader effectiveness from Judge, Bono, Ilies & Gerhard (2002) Personality trait Leader emergence Leader effectiveness Neuroticism -.24 -.22 Extraversion .33 .24 Openness .24 .24 Agreeableness .05 .21 Conscientousness .33 .16 Multiple R .53 .39 Extraversion has the highest and most consistent correlate of leadership criteria, indicating that this might the most important trait of leaders. According to Hogan, Curphy and Hogan (1994) Extraversion is needed in order to be perceived as leaderlike; energetic, active, and

socially dominant. That Extraversion is more strongly related to leader emergence than to leader effectiveness which might be the consequence of that sociable and dominant people are more likely to assert themselves in group situations. Talking is a primary tool for leaders (Tyrstrup, 2008), Extraverts talk more and talking is strongly related to emergent leadership (Bass, 1990). After Extraversion, Openness and Neuroticism were the strongest and most consistent correlates of leadership. Openness is the least understood trait in the five factor model and has not been related to many applied criteria. Although it seems as if Openness is related to leadership probably due to the connection with divergent and creative thinking. Neuroticism is consistent over criteria, indicating that self-esteem and self-confidence is important for successful leadership. Neurotic individuals are less likely to be perceived as leaders and Neuroticism also been regarded as somewhat of g-factor of personality. Conscientousness show a stronger relationship with leader emergence than with leader effectiveness; the organizing activities of conscientious individuals may allow such individuals to quickly emerge as leaders. Leaders need to be initiative and persistent in order to be perceived as trustworthy. Agreeableness seems to be the least relevant of the Big Five traits; agreeable individuals tend to be compliant and passive which makes them less likely to emerge as leaders. But, on a construct level the relationship between Agreeableness and leadership is ambiguous. Cooperativeness and interpersonal sensitivity are related to leadership in a positive way (Bass, 1990; Zaccaro, Foti, & Kenny, 1991), but the facets of modesty (Bass, 1990) and need for affiliation are related in a negative way (Yukl, 2006). Support for the Five Factor Model as an organizing framework for personality when looking at leadership has shown to be relevant, therefore this is the model most common in empirical research. Although, this does not mean that the Big Five traits are single level of analysis most appropriate to predict all leadership criteria. Constructing criterion oriented personality scales by combining different levels of personality measures for different criteria can enhance the predictive power extensively. In order to get a picture of the hierarchical model of personality where the Big Five traits are one level of analysis the following is a short description of the proposed hierarchy starting at the bottom. At the bottom of the personality hierarchy we find items, single items that refer to single instances of attitudes, thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. Items that are psychologically similar cluster together and make up facets that makes out the second level (e.g. emotional control optimism, self-confidence etc.), these in turn cluster together into specific traits (e.g. Big Five dimensions) the third level in the hierarchy, similar traits can be grouped together to make up higher order personality traits (e.g. Digmans (1997) factor alpha and factor beta, or Hogans getting along and getting ahead Hogan & Kaiser, 2005). Depending on the criteria at hand different levels of analysis are to be applied in order to get the highest predictive power. There are some methodological issues to consider when looking at personality research and different work related criteria such as leadership. The benefit of matching specific personality traits to relevant criteria is truly important effecting the outcomes and magnitude of relationships. Otherwise the results are in the risk for getting blurred because of the abstract level on both criteria and predictor(s). The frequent comment that personality cant be reduced to five general traits is very much true. As Ones, Viswesvaran and Dilchert (2005) states; personality traits are not only hierarchically organized, the traits are not orthogonal, abnormal personality measures assess the same continuum of traits as normal adult personality traits, and as mentioned, there are compound personality traits that are especially useful in the prediction of specific organizational behaviors.

Another methodological issues is the fact that a lot of recent research on personality and leadership is meta-analytically derived. The method has a lot of advantages but its important to keep in mind that the estimated relationships are underestimates because it reports the validity of an individual personality trait when used alone. As Barrick and Mount (2005; p. 361) lays down; When the purpose is to enhance understanding of which personality constructs predict which components of performance, it is appropriate to examine the validity of each personality trait individually. However, when the purpose is to maximize prediction, the appropriate approach is to consider the validity of all relevant traits when used together. Therefore we need to examine the multiple correlation or composite validity to determine the predictive validity of the whole personality of individuals. The multiple correlation (R) using all the Big Five traits when predicting leader emergence has been estimated to .53, and .39 for effectiveness (Judge, Bono, Ilies & Gerhard, 2002; table 1). Except personality, what else? When discussing traits, personality is the most common perspective. Although, there is another trait that deserves to be mentioned when discussing leadership behavior. Intelligence , first introduced by Spearman 1904, or General Mental Ability, GMA, has reported to be one of the best predictors of general job performance with a correlation of .51 (Schmidt & Hunter, 1998). The relationship is stronger for complex jobs (Hunter, Schmidt & Le, 2006) supporting the importance of GMA for leadership referring to leadership tasks such as creative problem solving, developing strategies, integrating and interpreting large amounts of information, and planning. The meta-analytic correlation between GMA and perceived emergence (the authors discriminates between objective and perceived leader behaviour and objective emergence is not available in the study by Judge, Colbert & Ilies, 2004) .27 and objective effectiveness is estimated to .33. Combining traits The relationship between GMA and leadership might not be as strong as anticipated, having the correlation of .51 between GMA and general job performance in mind, especially when the relationship is expected to be stronger with more complex tasks. The comparison between GMA and personality might lead to the conclusion that personality is the compound of traits important in predicting leadership behavior. But, just as with separate personality traits; when the purpose is to maximize prediction, the appropriate approach is to consider the validity of all relevant traits when used together. The purpose with this approach is to be aware of and correcting for the relationships between the different traits. It is the multiple correlation (R) for the combination of personality and GMA that reveals the predictive power of traits in relation to leader emergence and leader effectiveness. These coefficients are not provided in the research literature today therefore both the regression coefficients for separate each trait on leadership criteria has been computed, as well as the multiple correlation (R) for personality and GMA together in predicting the two leadership criteria. For this analysis, correlations between all variables; five personality traits, GMA, leader emergence and leader effectiveness have been used. The underlying correlation coefficients are presented in Appendix 1 and the data sources are specified for each correlation in Appendix 2. The regression coefficients (beta weights) for separate traits on leader emergence and leader effectiveness are presented in figure 1.

Figure 1. Beta weight coefficients of personality traits and GMA on leader emergence and leader effectiveness
ES 0,09 0,09 0,16 0,30 0,10 0,16 0,12

EX

-0,14

0,10 0,35 0,27 0,16 0,10 0,20 0,30 0,40

GMA -0,40 -0,30 -0,20 -0,10 0,00

Emergence

Effectiveness

Note. Neuroticism is in this table reversed and labelled Emotional Stability (ES).

The results show that the effect of Emotional Stability (Neuroticism reversed) decreases for both leadership criteria compared to the univariate correlation presented in table 1. This is probably due to the fact that Neuroticism is the personality trait of most general character having the highest average correlation with the other Big Five traits. Both Extraversion and Conscientousness show strong effect on leader emergence and less strong for leader effectiveness indicating that these two traits are important in predicting successful leadership defined as leader emergence. The effect of Openness has decreased adding the GMA measure to the model. That Openness becomes this suppressor variable is not so surprising due to the fact that this personality factor has the highest correlation with GMA (see Appendix 1). Agreeableness keeps the ambiguous relationship over leader criteria. But as mentioned above; from another level of analysis the relationship might not be so surprising looking at the different facets of the agreeableness construct. In this table GMA appears to be as important as most of the personality traits which advocates the combination of personality measures and measures of GMA in predicting leader emergence leader effectiveness. In this analysis the multiple R was estimated to .55 for leader emergence, and .46 for leader effectiveness indicating that combining traits increase the association between traits and leadership. Describing these results in somewhat of personality profiles would, in order of importance for predicting leader emergence (+ indicates higher level predicts criteria, and indicates lower level predicts criteria); + Extraversion + Conscientousness + GMA + Openness - Neuroticism - Agreeableness

And for leader effectiveness; + GMA + Extraversion + Agreeableness + Openness + Conscientousness - Neuroticism Discussion There is a big difference between the notion of not so strong relationships as we anticipated and no relationship between personality traits and leadership. According to this review traits do matter and to some extent can they be helpful in predicting leadership behavior. Although personality research has made important advancements theres still a lot of work to be done; combining facets and traits from different levels to predict criteria, to look at the dark side of personality and connecting it to dysfunctional behavior, and using hierarchical models of personality to increase predictive power, to mention a few. When it comes to GMA the vast literature and research is a source not being acknowledged or used to very large extent, especially not in the Swedish selection area. Measuring GMA in selection processes is not very common in practice. This stands in contrast to the fact that intelligence is described as the most prototypic of all leader characteristics. Meaning that intelligence is the most important attribute that an individual associates with leadership (Judge, Colbert and Ilies, 2004). Although, there seems to be a difference between perceptual and objective measures of leadership emergence or effectiveness emphasizing that appearing intelligent and actually being intelligent are two different things. In the meta-analysis by Judge, Colbert and Ilies (2004) intelligence based on perceptions had substantially higher correlations than those using a paper-and-pencil (objective) measure of intelligence. The criteria was leadership emergence which is partly a product of impression management concluding that appearing smart is more important than actually being smart. As Tyrstrup (2008) notes The perception of the leader as competent and responsible is the important thing. Research on GMA and different situational aspects should also be in focus having in mind the results from the Judge, Colbert and Ilies (2004) study showing that it is more important to select or place intelligent individuals in leadership positions when the stress level is low and the leader has the ability to be directive. In such cases, the validity of intelligence may be substancial. (p. 548). There might also be alternative ways to conceptualize and measure aspects of intelligence although the empirical support for the general factor of intelligence is extensive. There is also the hypothesis that group intelligence moderates the relationship between leader intelligence and leader effectiveness, the question if group members simply dont like leaders whose intellect far exceeds their own deserves to be investigated. The relationship between GMA and leadership can, from another perspective, be regarded as a bit disappointing not being as strong as anticipated. Though, putting the coefficient in a selection setting highlights that an increase in validity can have large practical implications for utility (Schmidt & Hunter, 1998). One suggested explanation is that traits combine multiplicatively in their effects on leadership. This means that a leader needs for example GMA in order to be successful but this will only happen if the individual also possesses the other traits necessary for leadership. In some sense this is a compensatory way of looking at traits and leadership. But these results must also lead to the question if leadership tasks might

not be as complicated as we thought or at least of another character. Perhaps there is a need for looking at leadership from the perspective what leaders really do (Tyrstrup, 2005). The need for other leadership criteria is urgent in order to get a more complete understanding of the phenomenon. Leader emergence and leader effectiveness are insufficient in conceptualizing leadership, but this is probably partly due to the problems with defining the underlying construct of leadership. This is the real challenge, if possible at all. Research show that there are measurable differences in personality, not just between executives and the general population but also between top executives and lower levels of management (Ones, Viswesvaran & Dilchert, 2006). This supports the discussion above that a single ultimate right criteria for leadership or management wont or perhaps cannot emerge. Although, this does not mean that the existing research is non-informative, unnecessary or deserves to be ignored. Rome was not built in a day. Acknowledging individual differences such as personality traits and general mental ability is important for a number of reasons, both for the sake of organizations and individuals; putting the right person in the right place is one of them. Not taking individual differences into account is really the ultimate way of simplifying things; saying that everybody are the same, having the same prerequisites, or putting in another way; there are no individual differences that affects work place behaviour such as leadership. The area of personnel selection, including the selection of future leaders, is in the need for more professional ways of assessing candidates. Schmidt writes the following about the field of personnel selection: Some years back I realized that personnel selection had become a churning arena of constant irrationality. There is a huge disconnect between what we know to be true from research and what people pretend to be true. There is a serious corruption of scientific truth caused by legal and ideological intrusions into the field of selection and the failure of the profession to respond appropriately to these intrusions. (Schmidt, 2006, p. 27) No serious researcher is claiming that individual differences are the solitary important aspect on leadership behaviour or that the Big Five or GMA are the universal solution to all traitleadership research. Nor should any serious researcher claim that the context is the only source of information about leadership behaviour or that traits dont matter at all. Individual traits do matter and needs to be taken into account. On the other hand is it important to recognize the influence of situational strength, along with group and organizational context. An interactionistic perspective is needed in order to set all the pieces of the puzzle in the right place.

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Appendix 1

Table 2 Correlations between variables for analysis ES EX O ES 1.00 EX 0.19 1.00 O 0.16 0.17 1.00 A 0.25 0.17 0.11 C 0.26 0.00 -0.06 GMA 0.08 0.08 0.33 EM 0.24 0.33 0.24 EFF 0.22 0.24 0.24

GMA

EM

EFF

1.00 0.27 0.01 0.05 0.21

1.00 0.02 0.33 0.16

1.00 0.25 0.33

1.00 NA

1.00

Note. ES = Emotional Stability (in this matrix Neuroticism is reversed indicating Emotional Stability), EX = Extraversion, O = Openness, A = Agreeableness, C = Conscientousness, GMA = General Mental Ability, EM = Leader Emergence, EFF = Leader Effectiveness, NA = Non Applicable.

Appendix 2

Data sources Relationship Big Five (N = 135 539 683 001) Ones. D. (1993). Construct validty of integrity test. Unpublished thesis. (Table 3). Relationship Big Five and GMA (N = 941 15 931) Ackerman. P.L., & Heggestad. E. D. (1997). Intelligence, personality, and interests: Evidence for overlapping traits. Psychological Bulletin, 121, 219-245. (Table 1). Relationship Big Five and Leader Emergence and Effectiveness (N = 7 221 11 705) Judge. T.A., Bono. J. E., Ilies. R., & Gerhardt. M. W. (2002). Personality and leadership: A qualitative and quantitative review. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87, 4, 765-780. (Table 4). Relationship GMA and Leader Emergence and Effectiveness (N = 40 652) Judge. T.A., Colbert. A. E., & Ilies. R. (2004). Intelligence and leadership: A quantitative review and test of theoretical propositions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89, 3, 542-552. (Table 2).