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1-2McGraw-Hill/Irwin copyright © 2009 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, inc. All Rights Reserved

Leadership Traits

“Successful leaders share three abilities. The first is the ability to get along with others and build teams. Another is the ability to make sound and timely decisions. And the third is the ability to get things done. Unfortunately, only a relatively small percentage of leaders possess all three of these attributes.”

~ Gordy Curphy, Curphy Consulting Corporation

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Great Man Theory

• The Great Man Theory attempted to prove that leaders and followers are fundamentally different.

• Conclusions of the research:– Leaders were not qualitatively different

than followers.

– Intelligence, initiative, stress tolerance, responsibility, friendliness, and dominance, were moderately related to leadership success.

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Personality Traits and Leadership

• Personality: Is the impression a person makes on others.– Underlying, unseen structures and processes

inside a person that explain why we behave the way we do.

• Trait approach: Traits refer to recurring regularities or trends in a person’s behavior. – Theory maintains that people behave the way

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

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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

– Strong situations

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The Five Factor Model of Personality

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Implications of the Five Factor 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 Five factor model:– Is used by many researchers in some form.

– Is a useful method for profiling leaders.

– Appears to be universally applicable across cultures.

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Implications of the Five Factor Model (continued)

• Personality traits:– Can be reliably categorized into the five major

dimensions of the FFM.

– Are good measures of leadership potential.

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

– Tend to be difficult to change – People are “hard wired”.

– People tend to describe others using traitlike terms.

– All behavior is under conscious control.

– Insight into personality traits provides much information.

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The Building Blocks Of Skills

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Leadership Potential Profile

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Why Do Some Leaders Fail?

• Base rate of managerial incompetence may be as high as 75 percent.

• Reasons for high level of incompetence include:– Invalid selection and succession planning

systems.

– Ill-defined performance expectations.

– Poorly designed leadership development programs.

• Dark-side personality traits: Irritating, counter-productive behavioral tendencies that interfere with a leader’s ability to build cohesive teams.– Cause followers to exert less effort toward goal

accomplishment.

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Dark-Side Personality Traits

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Leadership Challenge Profile

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Intelligence and Leadership

• Intelligence: 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.

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The Building Blocks Of Skills

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The Triarchic Theory of Intelligence

• The theory focuses on what a leader does when solving complex mental problems.

• The Triarchic Theory of Intelligence consists of:– Analytic intelligence– Practical intelligence– Creative intelligence

• Divergent thinking

• Convergent thinking

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The Components of Creative Intelligence

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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 where others can be creative.

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Improving Organizational Creativity

• Leaders should be mindful that:– Various sorts of incentives or rewards can have

various effects on creativity.

– Synthetic abilities can be hindered if ideas will be evaluated.

– In order to develop new products and services, the level of turnover should be low, and goals should be clear.

– Creeping elegance should be avoided.

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Creativity Killers: How to Squelch the Creativity of Direct Reports

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Intelligence and Stress: Cognitive Resources Theory

• Cognitive resources theory: A conceptual scheme for explaining how leader behavior changes under stress levels to impact group performance.

• Key concepts of theory include:– Intelligence, experience, stress, 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 old solutions when creative solutions are more apt.

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Cognitive Resource Theory (continued)

• Problems concerning CRT:– Apparent dichotomy between intelligence and

experience.

– Leader’s ability to tolerate stress.

– Correlation between dark-side traits and stress.

• 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.

– Level of stress inherent in the position needs to be understood before selection of leaders.

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Ability and Mixed Models of Emotional Intelligence

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Comparison between the FFM and Goleman’s Model of EQ

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Implications of Emotional Intelligence

• Most researchers agree that EQ can be developed.

• People can be extremely ineffective when their thoughts, feelings, and actions are misaligned.

• Noncognitive abilities can play important roles in leadership success.

• It has helped bring emotion back to the workplace.

• 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.

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Emotional Intelligence And The Building Blocks Of Skills

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Summary

• 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.

• The Five Factor Model comprises the bright side of personality, but many traits also contribute to the dark side of personality.

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

• Emotional intelligence in leaders is said to make them more effective.