The relationship between conscientiousness, extraversion and leadership effectiveness among local government managers in Eastern Cape, South Africa

Abstract

For the last 18 years, an insignificant development has been achieved in creating one organisational culture of the Eastern Cape local government that can promote an effective and efficient spending of the annual provincial budgetary allocation of more than fifty-six billion rands ($56,964,320,000). The development and fall of the local government administration is centred on the abilities and values of leaders present. The department has used five million rands ($5,086,100) to implement a leadership development programme that took nine months for 130 strategic managers as a strategy to solve leadership challenges that are manifested in poor service delivery in Eastern Cape Province. The purpose of this research study was to investigate the relationship between conscientiousness, extraversion, and leadership effectiveness among the local government managers in Bisho and East London. The data was collected from a sample of 222 local government managers using a self-designed biographical and occupational data questionnaire; appropriate subscales of Five-factor Inventory adopted from John (1990)’s initial and validated big-five prototypes and leadership effectiveness scales adopted from Fleenor and Bryant (2002). Pearson correlation analysis method was used to assess the relationship between conscientiousness, extraversion and leadership effectiveness, and a multiple regression analysis method was also used assess the additive effect of conscientiousness and extraversion on leadership effectiveness. The results indicated that conscientiousness and extraversion are significantly related to leadership effectiveness. The results also showed that conscientiousness and extraversion put together have an additive effect on leadership effectiveness. However, conscientiousness accounted for a higher proportion of variance in leadership effectiveness than extraversion. The study therefore, recommends that local government managers should use conscientiousness and extraversion as their basis when selecting people for leadership positions. Key words: Conscientiousness, extraversion, leadership, leadership effectiveness, local government, big-five model.