Personality Theories of Leadership

Are you born to be a leader? Are you a “natural”? Or is leadership a set of behaviors and competencies that anyone can develop, given the right experiences, circumstances, and training? The answers to these questions have been debated for centuries. Here, we focus on theories of leadership that would answer with a resounding yes to the first two questions, emphasizing that leadership is deeply embedded within our personalities or in the traits with which we were born. This entry defines and reviews personality- and trait-based theories of leadership before turning to critiques of these approaches.

Personality- and trait-based approaches to leadership argue that certain individuals have innate characteristics that make them ideally suited for leadership, and these traits or characteristics are what differentiate these leaders from everyone else. Early approaches in this genre included the great man theories, which were based on the assumption that the capacity for leadership is inherentthat great leaders are born, not made or developed. These theories often portrayed great leaders as heroic, mythical, and uniquely destined to rise to leadership when their skills were needed. The term great man reflects an assumption of these early theories that leadership was a predominantly male quality, especially in the domains of political and military leadership.

One of the first systematic attempts to understand leadership in the 20th century, the great man theory evolved into personality- or trait-based approaches as more modern research revealed that leadership was not inherently male dominated and that leadership could be found and studied in more common settings rather than at the highest levels of organizations or nations. More than a century of research has been conducted on the traits that have been associated to a greater or lesser degree with leadership, and some traits have received consistent support while others have emerged in some studies but not in others. An overview of research on the Big Five personality factors and the degree to which each has been linked to leadership is followed by a summary of the five more-specific traits that have been most consistently connected to leadership.