Leadership Personality

Introduction

Common sense suggests that leadership is the most important topic in the social, behavioural, and organizational sciences. A trip through the business section of any bookstore will also reveal that it is the most popular – based on the number of books written on the topic (well over 7000). The literature on leadership falls into two discrete categories. The first, and by far the largest, contains books designed for the popular or mass market. This vast literature contains nuggets of wisdom and flashes of insights from entrepreneurs, military officers, historians, business school professors, and consultants; however, it is not systematic, empirical, or verifiable, and it lacks an assessment base. In short, it is not a foundation on which to build a reliable understanding of leadership; it is entertaining rather than deeply informative.

The second literature, and by far the smaller of the two, comes from the empirical tradition of Academia. This tradition has the critically important characteristic of adhering to the standards of intellectual accountability that normally prevail in empirical research – publicly available data, standardized analytical methods, peer review, etc. By definition, then, the empirical tradition is more informative about leadership, at least in principle, than the vast collection of opinions contained in the literature designed for mass markets. But the empirical tradition suffers from four problems that limit its utility. First, it typically defines leadership in terms of the persons who happen to be in charge of the organizational unit being studied. But many, if not most, people who are in charge of organizational units attain their status for political reasons rather than because they have demonstrated significant leadership. In addition, by defining leadership operationally, the empirical tradition avoids the question of what leadership really is. Second, by defining leadership operationally, the empirical literature doesn't converge – because the characteristics of persons in charge of one organizational unit are typically different from the characteristics of persons in charge of a different unit, and it is nearly impossible to compare leadership (defined in this way) across organizations. Third, the empirical tradition has been strongly influenced by behaviourism, and as a result largely ignores the relationship between personality and leadership – from a behaviourist perspective, circumstances are more important than personality as an influence on leadership. And fourth, the empirical tradition has largely ignored the links between leadership and organizational effectiveness – arguing that effectiveness is too hard to define.

We believe that some attention to these definitional and conceptual issues will substantially clarify the assessment of leadership.