Chapter 4

The Leader as
an Individual

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 Learning Objectives
• Understand the importance of self-
awareness and recognize one’s blind spots
• Identify major personality dimensions and
understand how personality influences
leadership and relationships within
organizations

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©2015 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
 Learning Objectives
• Clarify instrumental and end values, and
recognize how values guide thoughts and
behavior
• Define attitudes and explain their
relationship to leader’s behavior
• Explain attributions and recognize how
perception affects the leader-follower
relationship

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 Learning Objectives
• Recognize individual differences in
cognitive style and broaden one’s own
thinking style to expand leadership
potential
• Understand how to lead and work with
people with varied personality traits

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 Self-Awareness
• Being conscious of the internal aspects of
one’s nature
– Personality traits
– Emotions
– Values
– Attitudes and perceptions
– Appreciating how your patterns affect other
people 

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 Importance of Self-Awareness
• Helps leaders to remain grounded and
constant
– Allows people to know what to expect from
them
• People require self-reflection to avoid blind
spots
– Blind spots: Characteristics or habits that
people are not aware of or do not recognize
as problems
• Limit people's effectiveness and careers
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 Personality

Set of unseen characteristics and

processes that underlie a relatively
stable pattern of behavior in response
to ideas, objects, and people in the
environment

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 Big Five Personality
Dimensions
• Extroversion: Degree to which a person is
outgoing, sociable, talkative, and
comfortable meeting and talking to new
people
– Characteristic of dominance
• High degree of dominance could even be
detrimental to effective leadership

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©2015 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
 Big Five Personality
Dimensions
• Agreeableness: Degree to which a person
is able to get along with others
– Being good-natured, cooperative, forgiving,
compassionate, understanding, and
trusting
• Conscientiousness: Degree to which a
person is responsible, dependable,
persistent, and achievement-oriented
– Focus on a few goals

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 Big Five Personality
Dimensions
• Emotional stability: Degree to which a
person is well-adjusted, calm, and secure
– Emotionally stable leader can:
• Handle stress and criticism well, and does not
take mistakes or failures personally
• Develop positive relationships
• Improve relationships
– Leaders with a low degree of emotional
stability can become tense, anxious, or
depressed

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©2015 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
 Big Five Personality
Dimensions
• Openness to experience: Degree to which
a person has a broad range of interests
and is imaginative, creative, and willing to
consider new ideas
– Important as leadership is about change

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 Locus of Control
• Placing the primary responsibility for what
happens to a person within himself or
herself or on outside forces
– High internal locus of control or internals -
Belief that actions determine what happens
to a person
– High external locus of control or externals -
Belief that outside forces determine what
happens to a person

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 Differences in Behavior Between
Internals and Externals
Internals Externals
• More self-motivated • Have structured, directed
• Better in control of their work situations
own behavior • Better able to handle work
• Participate more in social that requires compliance
and political activities and conformity
• Actively seek information
• Better able to handle
complex information and
problem solving

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 Authoritarianism
• Belief that power and status differences
should exist in an organization
– Leader’s degree of authoritarianism will
affect how the leader wields and shares
power
• High authoritarianism
– Traditional and rational approach to
management
• Autocratic style of leadership

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 Values
• Fundamental beliefs that an individual
considers to be important
– Relatively stable over time
– Impact attitudes and behavior
• End values: Beliefs about the kind of goals
or outcomes that are worth trying to
pursue
• Instrumental values: Beliefs about the
types of behavior that are appropriate for
reaching goals

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 Values
• Influence how leaders relate to others
• Personal values influence how leaders:
– Perceive opportunities, situations, and
problems
– Make decisions in response to them

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 Attitude
• Evaluation about people, events, or things
– Can be either positive or negative
– Leader’s attitudes toward followers
influence how they relate to people

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 Theory X and Theory Y

Theory X

• Assumption that people are basically lazy and

not motivated to work and that they have a
natural tendency to avoid responsibility

Theory Y

• Assumption that people do not inherently

dislike work and will commit themselves
willingly to work that they care about

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 Exhibit 4.3 - Attitudes and
Assumptions of Theory X and Theory Y

Source: J. Hall and S. M. Donnell, “Managerial Achievement: The Personal Side of Behavioral Theory,” Human Relations 32 (1979), pp. 77–101

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 Social Perception
• Making sense out of the environment by
selecting, organizing, and interpreting
information
– Values and attitudes affect perceptions, and
vice versa

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 Perpetual Distortions
• Errors in judgment that arise from
inaccuracies in the perceptual process
– Stereotyping: Assigning an individual to a
group and attributing generalizations about
the group to the individual
• Hinders from knowing people who are
stereotyped
– Halo effect: Overall impression of a person
or situation based on one characteristic
• Blinds the perceiver to other characteristics

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 Perpetual Distortions
– Projection: Tendency to see one’s own
personal traits in others
– Perceptual defense: Protecting oneself by
disregarding ideas, situations, or people
that are unpleasant

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 Attributions
• Judgments about what caused a person’s
behavior
– Either characteristics of the person or of
the situation 
– Internal attribution - Belief that
characteristics of the person led to the
behavior
– External attribution - Belief that the
situation caused the person’s behavior

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 Attributions
• Help people decide how to handle a
situation
• Fundamental attribution error: Tendency
to:
– Underestimate the influence of external
factors
– Overestimate the influence of internal
factors 

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 Attributions
• Self-serving bias: Tendency to
overestimate the influence of:
– Internal factors on one’s successes
– External factors on one’s failures

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 Cognitive Differences
• Cognitive style: How a person perceives,
processes, interprets, and uses
information
• Patterns of thinking and brain dominance
– Left hemisphere - Logical, analytical
thinking and a linear approach to problem
solving
– Right hemisphere - Creative, intuitive,
values-based thought processes

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 Cognitive Differences
– Whole brain concept: Considers a person’s
preference for right-brained versus left-
brained thinking and conceptual versus
experiential thinking
• Identifies four quadrants of the brain related to
different thinking styles 

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 Exhibit 4.4 - Hermann’s
Whole Brain Model

Source: Ned Herrmann, The Whole Brain Business Book (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996) p. 15
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 Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
(MBTI)™
• Measures how individuals differ in
gathering and evaluating information for
solving problems and making decisions
• Uses different pairs of attributes to classify
people in 1 of 16 different personality types
– Introversion versus extroversion
– Sensing versus intuition
– Thinking versus feeling
– Judging versus perceiving

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 Working with Different
Personality Types
• Leaders can work effectively by:
– Understanding one’s own personality and
how they react to others
– Treating everyone with respect
– Acknowledging each person’s strengths
– Striving for understanding
– Remembering that everyone wants to fit in

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