Hope

Characteristics of High-Hope Persons

To comprehend high hope as applied to leadership, it is useful to examine the advantages of high- as compared to low-hope thinking. High-hope individuals have a large number of clear, well-articulated goals. Their goals are personally important and valuable. Moreover, they prefer stretch goals—challenging goals that push the limits of their personal abilities. Having such goals, high-hope persons are able to identify specific routes for attaining them.

If a goal is large, complex, or distant in time, the high-hope person can break this goal into subgoals that can be clearly conceptualized and easily obtained. In turn, as these smaller subgoals are attained, the success experiences foster a sense of agency, or goal-directed determination. As goals are pursued, therefore, successes along the way promote positive emotions that feed back and further energize the goal-striving, high-hope person. High-hope persons also are energized by their memories of past successes that further motivate them to use their pathways to reach desired goals. Furthermore, when an impediment is encountered in the pursuit of a goal, the high-hope person can think of alternative pathways to go around the obstacle and continue the quest toward the desired objective.

Not only are high-hope persons focused on attaining their goals, but they also are invested socially in their interactions with others. Not surprisingly, hopeful thinking develops in the context of secure and trustworthy childhood relationships with positive adult role models. Accordingly, high-hopers are secure in their relationships with others, they support others' goals, and they take pleasure in others' accomplishments. Likewise, by providing support, highhope people often are able to instill hope in others.

Why High-Hope People are Effective Leaders

There are several reasons why high-hope people are effective leaders. They are able to clearly conceptualize goals, they can articulate these succinct goals to others, and they can forge subgoals to complex goals that are large and temporally distant. As such, subgoals are the pathways (strategies or action plans) through which high-hope leaders are able to facilitate the attainment of large goals. In the organizational context, the high-hope leader's clear goal setting and facile communication provide lucid short- and long-term objectives for the group. Through their capacities to identify achievable subgoals, high-hope leaders increase the work motivation of group members and thereby enhance the likelihood of subsequent successes in reaching the larger organizational goals. Thus, the hopeful leader sparks the agency thinking of his or her “followers.” Furthermore, because highhope leaders are invested in and enjoy “social commerce,” they are likely to take an active interest in the personal goals of their followers and act as “coaches” or mentors. In this way, high-hope leaders model hope for other workers. In turn, the followers eventually will be able to take on leadership roles themselves, thereby contributing even more to the group's success.

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