Copyright © 2015 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved.

No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education. 6-1
Copyright © 2015 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Chapter
6
Leadership Attributes

“Watch your thoughts, for they become words.

Watch your words, for they become actions.
Watch your actions, for they become habits.
Watch your habits, for they become character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your
destiny.”
~ Anonymous

6-2
Introduction

• The Great Man Theory attempted to prove that

leaders and followers are fundamentally
different.
• Hundreds of research studies looked at whether
certain personality traits, physical attributes,
intelligence, or personal values differentiated
leaders from followers.
• Researchers made two conclusions:
– Leaders were not qualitatively different than followers.
– Intelligence, initiative, stress tolerance, responsibility,
friendliness, and dominance were moderately related
to leadership success.

6-3
Personality Traits and Leadership
• Personality has two meanings:
– The impression a person makes on others.
– Underlying, unseen structures and processes inside a
person that explain behavior
• Most research about the relationship between
personality and leadership is based on trait
approach.
– Traits are recurring regularities or trends in a person’s
behavior.
– Trait approach theory maintains that people behave
the way they do because of the strengths of the traits
they possess.

6-4
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 are unfamiliar and ambiguous.
– Strong situations are governed by specific rules,
demands, or organizational policies, which can
minimize the effects that traits have on behavior.

6-5
What is Intelligence?

• Intelligence is 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.
• Intelligence is relatively difficult to change
because of heredity but can be modified with
education and experience.
6-6
The Building Blocks Of Skills

6-7
The Triarchic Theory of Intelligence

• The triarchic theory of intelligence focuses

on what a leader does when solving complex
mental problems.
• According to the theory, there are three basic
types of intelligence.
– Analytic intelligence: general problem-solving ability
– Practical intelligence: street smarts
– Creative intelligence: ability to produce novel and
useful work
• Assessing creativity involves using
– Divergent thinking tests –many possible answers
– Convergent thinking tests –one single best answer

6-8
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.

6-9
Implications of the Triarchic Theory
of Intelligence (continued)
• To improve the group and organizational
factors affecting 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.

6-10
What is Emotional Intelligence?
• There are 4 major definitions of emotional
intelligence that can be broken down into two
models:
– The ability model focuses on how emotions affect the
way leaders think, decide, plan, and act.
– The mixed model provides a broader and more
comprehensive definition than the ability model
because it includes more leadership qualities.
• The mixed model is more popular among HR
professionals than the ability model but no more
predictive of job performance than OCEAN
assessments (Big Five Personality Traits).

6-11
Implications of Emotional
Intelligence

• People can be extremely ineffective when their

thoughts, feelings, and actions are misaligned.
• Noncognitive abilities can play important roles
in leadership success.
• EQ literature 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.

6-12
Emotional Intelligence and the Building
Blocks Of Skills

6-13
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.
• Research suggests a positive correlation
between leadership success and the OCEAN
personality dimensions.
• Analytic intelligence, practical intelligence, and
creative intelligence theories help in
understanding intelligence.
• EQ in leaders may make them more effective.
6-14