What Makes a Leader? An Investigation into the Relationship between Leader Emergence and Effectiveness

Luke Treglown,Jayson Darby,Sonya Bendriem,Stephen Cuppello,Scott Mackintosh,Adrian Furnham,Ian Macrae,Merle Ballaigues

doi:10.4236/psych.2020.119089

Abstract

Are the traits that predict leadership emergence the same that predict leadership effectiveness? How do leader attributes play either a direct or dynamic role in predicting organisational outcomes? This paper presents an investigation into the personality-performance relationship to address these questions. 936 general population and 198 senior leadership participants took the High Potential Trait Indicator (HPTI). The first part examined how levels of personality traits differentiated leaders from a general population. The second examined the relationship between leader personality, competencies and organizational success to assess whether the traits of leader emergence are the same as effectiveness. Additionally, this section simultaneously examined the role of leader traits and attributes play in predicting organizational performance. The results indicated that all six HPTI traits were associated with leader emergence. However, only three—Adjustment, Risk Approach, and Ambiguity Acceptance—were also positively predictive of leadership effectiveness. Curiosity showed mixed benefits for leaders, whilst Conscientiousness and Competitiveness did not differentiative leader effectiveness. Additionally, leader attributes were found not to predict performance. This paper offers novel insight into the important role of personality in distinguishing leader emergence as well as leader effectiveness. Implications are discussed in relation to models of leadership and potential, as well as for practice include identifying high potential talent and diversity in psychometric testing.

Highlights

There is a growing interest in Organisational Psychology to understand both the personality traits that predict leadership emergence, as well as how traits of leaders impact the success of their organisation (Colbert et al, 2014; Waldman & Yammarino, 1999)
Are the traits that predict leadership emergence the same that predict leadership effectiveness? How do leader attributes play either a direct or dynamic role in predicting organisational outcomes? This paper presents an investigation into the personality-performance relationship to address these questions. 936 general population and 198 senior leadership participants took the High Potential Trait Indicator (HPTI)
The results indicated that all six HPTI traits were associated with leader emergence

Summary

Introduction

There is a growing interest in Organisational Psychology to understand both the personality traits that predict leadership emergence, as well as how traits of leaders impact the success of their organisation (Colbert et al, 2014; Waldman & Yammarino, 1999). Academics have conceptualised personality in two ways: how a person thinks about themselves, and how others think about that person (Hogan & Kaiser, 2005) It describes the “fundamental, consistent aspects of how a person thinks and reacts emotionally, and how those reactions influence behaviour” (MacRae & Furnham, 2014). Personality researchers argued that personality traits contribute to leader emergence in two ways: firstly, traits are argued to contribute to the speed at which someone is promoted to leadership because these traits contribute to an employee’s work ethic, dependability, and reliability (Furnham et al, 2013); secondly, personality has been shown to influence leader emergence as a function of political or networking skills (Furnham et al, 2013). Teodorescu, Furnham, and Macrae (2017) investigated associations between personality traits and leader emergence, finding personality to be predictive of objective measures of leadership emergence (e.g. promotion rates), with Conscientiousness being the strongest predictor. Personality has been shown to reliably explain variance in leadership emergence (Ensari et al, 2011), with recent studies showing that traits such as Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Openness, and Agreeableness being predictive of emergence (Judge et al, 2002)

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