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7
Chapter

Leadership Traits

• Leadership is
understanding people
and involving them to
help you do a job. That
takes all of the good
characteristics, like
integrity, dedication of
purpose, selflessness,
knowledge, skill,
implacability, as well as
determination not to 1-2
Reading Objectives:

• The student will comprehend what

personality is and how it affects
leadership; in both positive and negative
ways.
• The student will comprehend what
intelligence is and how intelligence
correlates to effective leadership.
• The student will comprehend what
emotional intelligence is and how it can
be developed.

.
7-3
Discussion Objectives:

• Discuss what intelligence is.

• Discuss the Triarchic Theory of
Intelligence.
• Discuss the meaning of creative
intelligence and how it differs from other
forms of intelligence.
• Discuss how stress affects intelligence.
• Discuss what emotional intelligence is
and how it is different from other kinds
of intelligence.
• Discuss how emotional intelligence can
be developed.

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Great Man Theory

• The Great Man Theory attempted to

prove that leaders and followers are
fundamentally different.
• Conclusions of the research:
– Leaders were not qualitatively different
than followers.
– Intelligence, initiative, stress tolerance,
responsibility, friendliness, and
dominance, were moderately related to
leadership success.

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 The Building Blocks Of Skills

Focus of Chapter 6
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Personality Traits and Leadership

• Personality: Is the impression a person

makes on others.
– Underlying, unseen structures and processes
inside a person that explain why we behave the
way we do.
• Trait approach: Traits refer to recurring
regularities or trends in a person’s
behavior.
– Theory maintains that people behave the way
they do because of the strengths of the traits
they possess.

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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
– Strong situations

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The Five Factor Model of Personality

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Implications of the Five Factor
Model

• Provides an explanation for leaders’ and

followers’ tendencies to act in consistent
ways over time.
• Behavioral manifestations of personality
traits are often exhibited automatically and
unconsciously.
• The Five factor model:
– Is used by many researchers in some form.
– Is a useful method for profiling leaders.
– Appears to be universally applicable across
cultures.

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Implications of the Five Factor
Model (continued)
• Personality traits:
– Can be categorized into the five major
dimensions of the FFM.
– Are good measures of leadership potential for a
given situation.
– Can be used to make predictions about typical
behavior at work.
– Tend to be difficult to change quickly.
– People tend to describe others using traitlike
terms.
– Insight into personality traits provides useful
information.

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Why Do Some Leaders Fail?
• Reasons for high level of incompetence include:
– Invalid selection and succession planning
systems (not usually cited as a problem in the
military).
– Ill-defined performance expectations (should not
be a problem in the military).
– Poorly designed leadership development
programs (we focus on this a lot – you are in a 4
year long development program to qualify to start
the next phase).
• Dark-side personality traits: Irritating, counter-
productive behavioral tendencies that interfere
with a leader’s ability to build cohesive teams.
– Cause followers to exert less effort toward goal
accomplishment. 7-12
Dark-Side Personality Traits

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The Building Blocks Of Skills

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 Intelligence and Leadership

• Intelligence: 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.
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The Triarchic Theory of Intelligence

• The theory focuses on what a leader

does when solving complex mental
problems.
• The Triarchic Theory of Intelligence
consists of:
– Analytic intelligence
– Practical intelligence
– Creative intelligence
• Divergent thinking
• Convergent thinking

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The Components of Creative
Intelligence

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Implications of the Triarchic Theory
of Intelligence
• Leadership effectiveness is positively
correlated with analytic intelligence.
• Sometimes, personality is much more
predictive of leadership 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.

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Improving Organizational Creativity

• Leaders should be mindful that:

– Clearly various sorts of incentives or rewards can
have various effects on creativity.
– The ability to create 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 as
products become unnecessarily complex and
may no longer solve the original problem.

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Creativity Killers: How to Squelch
the Creativity of Direct Reports

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 Intelligence and Stress: Cognitive
Resources Theory
• Cognitive resources theory:
A conceptual scheme for
explaining how leader
behavior changes under
stress levels to impact group performance.
• Key concepts of theory include:
– Intelligence, experience, stress, group performance.
• Theory predictions include:
– Greater experience but lower intelligence may
account for higher-performing groups in high stress
conditions.
– High levels of experience may account for usage of
old solutions when creative solutions are more apt.

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Cognitive Resource Theory
(continued)
• Problems concerning CRT:
– Apparent dichotomy between intelligence and
experience.
– Leader’s ability to tolerate stress.
– Correlation between dark-side traits and stress.
• Implications of CRT:
– The best leaders are often smart and
experienced – there is a reason the military
doesn’t bring in middle managers from the
“outside.”
– Leaders may be unaware of the degree to which
they are causing stress in their followers.
– Level of stress inherent in the position needs to
be understood before selection of leaders. 7-22
Emotional Intelligence And The Building
Blocks Of Skills

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Ability and Mixed Models of Emotional
Intelligence

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Comparison between the FFM and
Goleman’s Model of EQ

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Implications of Emotional
Intelligence
• Most researchers agree that EQ can be
developed.
• People can be extremely ineffective when their
thoughts, feelings, and actions are misaligned.
• Noncognitive abilities can play important roles
in leadership success.
• Research indicates that EQ moderates
employees’ reactions to job insecurity and their
coping ability toward job related stress.
• Military leaders are expected to use EQ to best
lead their personnel – when it makes sense. At
times, a non-EQ approach may be required.
• The non-military stereotype can be that the
military only conducts work in a non-EQ fashion. 7-26
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.
• The Five Factor Model comprises the bright
side of personality, but many traits also
contribute to the dark side of personality.
• Analytic intelligence, practical intelligence, and
creative intelligence theories help in
understanding intelligence.
• Emotional intelligence in leaders will make them
more effective.
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 Next session
• Leadership Behavior
• Read: Leadership, Chapter 8 & AFO
Chapter 3

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 Leadership Dilemma
Brand new E-2 reports in to you at your overseas
duty station (counts as “sea duty” because of the
location and generally treated as such) for her 1
year tour. She has graduated from Boot Camp
and A School. She has a young daughter and
she signed custody over to her mother so she
could enlist; her mom does not want to take care
of the child any longer than necessary. The E-2
wants to know when she can go home since she
is in the reserves and “can’t stay for more than a
few weeks.” She obviously thinks as a reservist
that she works one weekend a month and two
weeks a year – not realizing she is on active 7-29