Leadership enhancing the lessons of experience 8th by hughes curphy chap 06

• Hundreds of research studies looked at whether certain personality traits, physical attributes, intelligence, or personal values differentiated leaders from followers.. Personality Tra

Leadership Attributes

“Watch your thoughts, for they become words.

Watch your words, for they become actions.

Watch your actions, for they become habits.

Watch your habits, for they become character.

Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.”

• The Great Man Theory attempted to prove that

leaders and followers are fundamentally

different

• Hundreds of research studies looked at whether certain personality traits, physical attributes,

intelligence, or personal values differentiated

leaders from followers

• Researchers made two conclusions:

– Leaders were not qualitatively different than followers – Intelligence, initiative, stress tolerance, responsibility,

Introduction

Personality Traits and Leadership

• Personality has two meanings:

– The impression a person makes on others.

– Underlying, unseen structures and processes inside a person that explain behavior

• Most research about the relationship between

personality and leadership is based on the trait

approach.

– Traits are recurring regularities or trends in a

person’s behavior

– Trait approach theory maintains that people behave

the way they do, because of the strengths of the traits they possess.

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 are unfamiliar and ambiguous.

– Strong situations are governed by specific rules,

The Five Factor or

OCEAN Model of Personality

Implications of the

Five Factor or OCEAN Model

• The 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 OCEAN model is useful in many ways.

• Leaders gain self-insight to improve decision making.

• Leadership researchers categorize findings

• Model helps to profile leaders.

• Model seems to be universally applicable across cultures.

1 Are good measures of leadership potential.

2 Can be used to make predictions about typical behavior at work.

3 Tend to be difficult to change.

4 Are exhibited automatically and without conscious thought

5 Predispose people to act in certain ways, but behaviors can be modified through experience, feedback, and reflection

OCEAN MODEL PROFILE

The Differences between

Traits and Types

• An alternative framework to describe the

differences in people’s day-to-day behavioral

patterns is through types, or in terms of a

personality typology.

• Psychological typologies are often expressed

in terms of polar opposites

– Typologies tend to put people into discrete

psychological categories and emphasize the similarities among people in the same category and the differences between people of different types regardless of actual score.

Psychological Preferences as a Personality Typology

• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) measures psychological preferences, or “mental habits.”

• Each year over 2 million people take the MBTI, one of most popular psychological tests

• The MBTI is very popular in college leadership courses, formal leadership training programs, and team building interventions

Psychological Preferences as a

Personality Typology (continued)

• MBTI has four basic preference dimensions

1 The extraversion-introversion dimension is

concerned with where people get their energy.

2 The sensing-intuition dimension is concerned with

how people look at data.

3 The thinking-feeling is concerned with the

considerations leaders prefer when making decisions.

4 The judging-perceiving dimension describes the

amount of information needed before a leader is comfortable making a decision.

Implications of Preferences

and Types

• Leaders are disproportionately distributed

across a handful of types

• Despite being useful, the MBTI has limitations

– Types are not stable over time.

– There are major development changes in distribution

of types with age

– The utility of typing systems remains uncertain

because the behavior of two people in the same type may vary as greatly as that of people of different

types

What is Intelligence?

• Intelligence is 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.

• Intelligence is relatively difficult to change

because of heredity but can be modified with

The Building Blocks Of Skills

The Triarchic Theory of Intelligence

• The triarchic theory of intelligence focuses on

what a leader does when solving complex mental problems

• According to the theory, there are three basic

types of intelligence

1 Analytic intelligence: general problem-solving ability

2 Practical intelligence: street smarts

3 Creative intelligence: ability to produce novel and

useful work

• Assessing creativity involves using

– Divergent thinking tests –many possible answers

– Convergent thinking tests –one single best answer

Implications of the Triarchic Theory

of Intelligence

• Leadership effectiveness or emergence is

positively correlated with analytic intelligence

• Sometimes, personality is much more predictive

of leadership emergence and 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

Implications of the Triarchic Theory

of Intelligence (continued)

• To improve the group and organizational

factors affecting creativity, leaders should

– Creeping elegance should be avoided.

Creativity Killers: How to Squelch

the Creativity of Direct Reports

Intelligence and Stress:

Cognitive Resources Theory

• Cognitive Resources Theory is a conceptual

scheme for explaining how leader behavior

changes under stress levels to impact group

performance

• CRT consists of several key concepts:

– Intelligence, experience, stress, and 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

Intelligence and Stress:

Cognitive Resources Theory (continued)

• Problematic issues concerning CRT:

– Apparent dichotomy between intelligence and

experience – Leader’s ability to tolerate stress

– Correlation between dark-side traits and stress

• Leadership implications of CRT:

– The best leaders are often smart and experienced.

– Leaders may be unaware of the degree to which they are causing stress in their followers.

– The level of stress inherent in the position needs to be

What is Emotional Intelligence?

• There are 4 major definitions of emotional

intelligence that can be broken down into two

models:

1 The Ability Model focuses on how emotions affect

the way leaders think, decide, plan, and act

2 The Mixed Model provides a broader and more

comprehensive definition than the ability model because it includes more leadership qualities.

• The Mixed Model is more popular among HR professionals than the Ability Model, but no more predictive of job performance than OCEAN

assessments.

Ability and Mixed Models of

Emotional Intelligence

Comparison between the OCEAN Model and Goleman’s Model of EQ

Can Emotional Intelligence Be

Measured and Developed?

• The Emotional Competence Inventory (ECI ) was developed by Daniel Goleman in 1998

• ECI consists of 10 questionnaires to be

completed by the individual and 9 others

• Instruments often provide leaders with

conflicting results

• Most researchers agree that Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ) can be developed

• Research indicates that EQ moderates

employees’ reactions to job insecurity and their coping ability toward job-loss related stress

• It appears that EQ attributes would be difficult to change as a result of training intervention

Emotional Intelligence and

Building Blocks Of Skills

• 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

• Research suggests a positive correlation

between leadership success and the OCEAN personality dimensions

• Analytic intelligence, practical intelligence, and creative intelligence theories help in

understanding intelligence

• EQ in leaders may make them more effective