Trait leadership
Trait leadership is defined as integrated patterns of personal characteristics that reflect a range of individual differences and foster consistent leader effectiveness across a variety of group and organizational situations.
[1][2] The theory is developed from early leadership research which focused primarily on finding a group of heritable attributes that differentiate leaders from nonleaders.
[6] Subsequent commentators interpreted this view to conclude that the forces of extraordinary leadership[a] shape history.
Galton found that leadership was a unique property of extraordinary individuals and suggested that the traits that leaders possessed were immutable and could not be developed.
[19][20][21] Despite the growing criticisms of trait leadership, the purported basis for the rejection of trait-leadership models began to encounter strong challenges in the 1980s.
Productive narcissistic CEOs like Steven Jobs of Apple and Jack Welch of GE have demonstrated a gift for creating innovation, whereas leaders with idealized traits prove more successful in more stable environments requiring less innovation and creativity.
[26] Cultural fit and leadership value can be determined by evaluating an individual's own behavior, perceptions of their employees and peers, and the direct objective results of their organization, and then comparing these findings against the needs of the company.
[3] For the demographics category, gender has by far received the most attention in terms of leadership; however, most scholars have found that male and female leaders are both equally effective.
[28] Hoffman et al grouped intelligence, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and emotional stability into this category.
[25] Recent research has shifted from focusing solely on distal (dispositional/trait-like) characteristics of leaders to more proximal (malleable/state-like) individual differences often in the form of knowledge and skills.
They found that distal individual differences of achievement motivation, energy, flexibility, dominance, honesty/integrity, self-confidence, creativity, and charisma were strongly correlated with leader effectiveness.
Their results suggested that on average, distal and proximal individual differences have a similar relationship with effective leadership.
The Leader Trait Emergence Effectiveness (LTEE) Model, created by Judge, Piccolo, & Kosalka in 2009, combines the behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology theories of how personality traits are developed into a model that explains leader emergence and effectiveness.
Additionally, this model separates objective and subjective leader effectiveness into different criterion.
The authors created this model to be broad and flexible as to diverge from how the relationship between traits and leadership had been studied in past research.
[3] The results of a Derue et al study supported an integrated trait-behavioral model that can be used in future research.
[43] these scholars have concluded that personality currently has low explanatory and predictive power over job performance and cannot help organizations select leaders who will be effective.
[2] Given the recent increase in evidence and support of trait leadership theory,[43] scholars have suggested a variety of strategies for human resource departments within organizations.
