A trait is a construct based on consistent individual differences between people. Personality is the organized pattern of distinctive traits of a specific person. Additional meanings may be added, such as the way personality traits are integrated. Simple to complex patterns may be formed. They may form hierarchies. For instance, the trait of agreeableness may consist of correlated sub-traits: trustingness, altruism, compliance, and tender-mindedness.
Traits and their expression may be captured as snapshots, but they are more enduring unlike momentary moods or states of being such as feeling angry or feeling happy. Roberts and DelVecchio (2000) demonstrated that traits were enduring and were not states like a person’s mood, which can change in a short time. These investigators completed a meta-analysis of 152 longitudinal studies of 3,217 test-retest correlations of traits occurring during two age periods. The mean correlation between age periods was only .31 in childhood but rose to .54 in later life. Traits are not the same as motives. Thus the trait of extroversion brings about unconflicted social motive expression; the trait of introversion blocks social motive expression and the attainment of social goals (Winter, John, Stewart, et al., 1998).
When traits are requirements for doing something, they are called “competencies.” Traits of leadership are competencies. They are needed if someone is to emerge, succeed, or be effective as a leader. Various kinds of traits are factors in leadership. Cognitive traits provide task competence and problem-solving abilities. These include intelligence, judgment, decisiveness, knowledge, fluency of speech, resourcefulness, technical abilities, intellectually stimulating qualities, vision, imagination, articulateness, diagnostic skills, originality, and creativity. Social competency traits include social intelligence, assertiveness, cooperativeness and the ability to enlist cooperation, attractiveness, affiliativeness, nurturance, sociability, interpersonal skills, social participation, tact, diplomacy, empathy, social insight, and attributional accuracy. Emotional competency traits include emotional intelligence, emotional maturity, self-confidence, self-esteem, self-efficacy, hardiness, and optimism. Those traits with negative impact on leadership include arrogance, narcissism, depression, anxiety, rigidity, neuroticism, lack of self-confidence, lack of self-esteem, and lack of self-efficacy. Biophysical traits of consequence to leadership include physical fitness and stature. Traits of character include integrity, honesty, moral reasoning, resilience, and discipline. Eye color, walking stride, and uxoriousness are examples of traits which are not ordinarily competencies of consequence to leadership.
The quest for universal leadership traits for all situations was abandoned by most, but not all, researchers in the 1950s and 1960s. Reviews by Bird (1940), Jenkins (1947), and Stogdill (1948) were cited frequently (and incorrectly) after 1948 to support the view that leadership was entirely situational in origin and that particular personal characteristics could not accurately predict leadership. This view overemphasized the situational and underemphasized the significance of the individual leader’s traits. For instance, Carter (1953), Gibb (1954), and Shartle (1956) inferred that stable relationships between traits and leadership pertained to specific situations only. The view that many are “born leaders” was rejected. Nevertheless, many scholars before and after 1970 still held that certain personal characteristics improved a leader’s chances of success (Van Fleet & Yukl, 1986). The connection between traits and leadership remained true for a wide variety of situations. Nonetheless, evidence was amassed to indicate that different skills and traits were required for leadership in different situations. Many of the behaviors and traits that enable a mobster to gain and maintain control over a criminal gang are not the same as those that enable a television evangelist to gain and maintain a following. Yet these two leaders may share some important traits, such as persistence, cupidity, and self-monitoring.
It was noted in Chapter 4 that, as Stogdill (1948, 1974) concluded, certain general qualities—such as initiative and fortitude—have appeared repeatedly as characteristics of leaders. Stogdill found that particular traits contributed to a person’s emergence as a leader in a wide variety of situations. This conclusion was supported in Mann’s (1959) survey of research on the relation of personality to performance in small groups. Mann found positive relationships between personal traits (intelligence, adjustment, extroversion, dominance, masculinity, and sensitivity) and leadership in 71% to 80% of the studies he included in his review. As mentioned above, Roberts and Del Veccio (2000) did a meta-analysis of 152 studies showing the stability of an individual’s traits, particularly among adults. They analyzed 3,217 test-retest correlations of personality tests with a controlled interval of 6.7 years between test and retest. Although the mean correlation was only .31 in childhood and .54 during college, it was .64 at age 30 and plateaued at .74 at ages from ages 50 to 70. Individual traits may be consistently important in a wide range of leadership situations.
Barnlund (1962) rotated 25 participants in groups of six in different combinations but misinterpreted the results. He attributed most of the variance to differences in the composition and task situation of the group. Twenty-one years later, in reexamining Barnlund’s data and conclusion, Kenny and Zaccaro (1983) noted that the average correlation in the leadership rank that individuals attained as members of the six composed and recomposed groups was .64. This correlation was substantial evidence of personal consistency in the emergence of leadership across the six situations. Kenny and Zaccaro concluded that Barnlund’s results supported the contention that between 49% and 82% of the variance in leadership could be accounted for by a stable personality trait. They inferred that this trait was “the ability to perceive the needs and goals of a constituency and to adjust one’s personal approach to group action accordingly” (p. 678). Zaccaro, Foti, and Kenny (1991) rotated their participants through four different group tasks in groups of three so that no two participants worked with the same participant more than once. The emergent leadership of each participant was rated the others after every task. Every task required using a different style of leadership: persuasion, initiating structure, consideration, and emphasis on production. The investigators isolated the variance due to the raters, the ratees, and their interaction. They found that 59% of the variance was due to the participants’ traits rather than to the different group task situations.
Leaders may be born as well as made, as we can see if we examine research of the past 30 years on genes, heritability, and leadership.
Leadership theory and research from 1975 to 2005 have turned us back again to considering the importance of traits. Research in cotwin studies and advances in microbiology and behavioral genetics have been helpful. Genetic factors have been shown to influence personality traits and their expression in different situations. At the same time, environmental experiences unique to individuals contribute to their development (Fulker & Cardon, 1993). Viken, Rose, et al. (1994) tested approximately 15,000 Finnish twins in extroversion and neuroticism, first at ages 18 to 53, and then six years later. Experience became more important with age, and no additional genetic effects appeared after age 30.
Cotwin Studies. In cotwin studies, a strong genetic component has been found in many traits associated with leadership, such as intelligence and assertiveness (Rose, 1995). In a cotwin study, variance in agreement on a specific trait between monozygotic or identical twins (from one egg) is compared with the agreement between a comparable pair of dyzygotic or fraternal twins (from two eggs). The higher the ratio of agreement between identical twins compared with the agreement between fraternal twins in a sample, the stronger the genetic effect. Ratios of .3 to .7 have been found for many traits associated with leadership. (A ratio of 1.0 would mean that 100 percent of the variance was genetic. A ratio approaching zero would mean there was no genetic effect.)
Molecular Biology Studies. At the level of molecular biology, traits and behaviors have been associated with multiple genes in a particular order in a chromosome (Science, 1995, pp. 4, 77; Cherney, 1998). But genes tend to work in a diffuse way (Hammer & Copeland, 1998). Neither a single gene nor the same genes in a different order may be of consequence. Identical twins share all their genes; fraternal twins share, on average, only half of their genes; nontwin brothers can share much less genetically. Thus, 33 out of 40 homosexual brothers had the same DNA variations in a region of the X chromosome, and half shared the same region of chromosome Xq28 (LeVay & Hamer, 1994). But heterosexual brothers inherited the opposite version of Xq28 (Hu, Patta tucci, et al., 1995).
Traits of Leadership Likely to Be Influenced by Genetics. Studies have found genetic effects of consequence to leadership for general intelligence (Bouchard & McGue, 1981), personality traits (Goldsmith, 1983), interests (Keller, 1992), and involvement in a job (Gilbert & Ones, 1998). Berenson (1997) suggested that strong effects based on cotwin studies and molecular biology demonstrate at least 30% heritability in traits related to leadership such as extroversion, shyness, sociability, self-confidence, cognitive abilities, verbal fluency, verbal comprehension, impulsivity, dominance, and aggression. Other traits subject to inheritance mentioned by investigators included achievement motivation, empathy, initiative, persistence, and speed of information processing (Dworkin, 1979; Ghodsian-Carpy & Baker, 1987; Horn, Plomin & Rosenman, 1976; Loehlin, 1992; Johnson, Vernon, & Harris, 2004; Mathews, Batson, et al., 1981; McCartney, Harris, & Bernieri, 1990; O’Connor, Foch, et al., 1980; Rose, 1995; Rushton, Fulker, et al., 1986; Tellegen, Lykken, et al., 1988). Estimates of the heritability of traits associated with leadership vary widely but converge on 30% to 50% of the total variance (Plomin, DeFries, & McClearn, 1990). For example, Loehlin (1992) found that 35% to 40% of the observed individual variation in extroversion attributed to genetics was correlated with leadership.
Mechanisms. The biological mechanisms linking genes and personality are beginning to be understood. For instance, “novelty seeking” is linked with variants of the gene for the dopamine molecule receptor in the brain. Dopamine is the brain’s reward chemical; it makes one feel good. Parkinson’s disease, caused by a degeneration of the dopamine-producing cells in the substantia nigra of the brain, significantly reduces novelty seeking (Hammer, 1997).
Not only are we able to present numerous studies showing the effects of genes on personality traits found to be predictive of leadership; there are also investigations that have directly connected genetics to leadership. Arvey, Rotundo, Johnson, et al. (2006) obtained data from the Minnesota Twin Registry to compare 238 identical twins (each pair genetically the same) with 188 fraternal twins (each pair with 50% in common in genetic background). They found that 30% of the variance in emergence as leaders was attributable to genetics. As part of a larger project by Vernon, McCarthy, et al. (undated) to study the effects of genetics on multiple dimensions of aggression, Johnson, Vernon, McCarthy, et al. (1998) surveyed 247 pairs of adult twins using mailed questionnaires: 183 pairs were monozygotic (MZ) and 64 pairs were dyzygotic (DZ). Forty-three of the pairs were men; 204 were women. The mean ages of the men and women were 42.8 and 44.5 years, respectively. They were recruited from a Canadian registry of twins or from the 3,000 pairs of twins from many countries who gather annually in Twinsburg, Ohio, for the Annual Twinsday Festival. Respondents completed self-report assessments of leadership, Cassel and Stancik’s Leadership Ability Evaluation (LAE, 1982); Bass and Avolio’s Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ, 1991); and Gough and Heilbrun’s Adjective Check List (ACL, 1983). Respondents also completed a “zygosity” questionnaire (Nichols & Bilbro, 1966) which had an accuracy of 93% when matched with blood-typing (Kasriel & Eaves, 1976).
For the LAE, the respondents are presented with 50 hypothetical situations and are asked to choose the style of leadership they would use to handle the situation: laissezfaire, democratic-cooperative, autocratic-submissive, or autocratic-aggressive. Additionally, nine transformational and transactional leadership scale scores were obtained from responses to the MLQ. From the ACL, a checklist of 300 adjectives, 49 were identified as descriptive of leader behavior.
Results were corrected for age and sex. All the leadership assessments except the transactional leadership scales showed genetic effects. That is, the correlation between MZ twins was significantly greater than that between DZ twins. For example, the correlation between the MZ twins’ transformational leadership scales ranged from .47 to .50; the corresponding correlations for the DZ twins ranged from .13 to .20. However the correlations between MZ twins’ transactional scales ranged from .25 to .31 and the corresponding scales for DZ twins ranged from .11 to .33. For ACL, the MZ twins correlated .50 with each other and the DZ twins correlated only .16. Correlations of the four LAE scores ranged from .31 to .45 for the MZ twins and from .09 to .29 for the DZ twins.
Genes are inherited, but this does not mean their effects are entirely fixed. The expression of genes is often plastic. The brain can be changed through learning. For instance, in one study elderly inactive “couch potatoes” were engaged in a program of physical exercises for an extended period. Compared with a control sample who did not exercise, the experimental sample showed marked improvements in presumably genetically determined brain functions (Davidson, 2001).
Until recently, it was thought that we continue to lose brain cells and synapses (their connections) as we age. Evidence is accumulating from brain scan research that synaptic networks and the numbers of cells may be increased with specialized experiences. “Use it or lose it” implies that cognitive abilities do not decline with aging as much in professionals who continue to carry on their brain work as in unskilled workers who do not engage in as much cognitive activity as they age. The specific areas of the brain impacted by cognitive and physical activities are detected by brain scans.
Monozygotic (MZ) twins may not show 100% concordance even though they share the same genes. This is because their prenatal environment may be different. Some MZ twins, for example, may not share the same placenta and chorion (membrane). Studies of MZ twins developing in the same or different placentas and chorions show that a shared prenatal environment plays a role in identical twins’ concordant intelligence, cognition, and personality (Phelps, Davis, & Schwartz, 1997). Use of tobacco, alcohol, or drugs by the mother can have deleterious effects on the fetus, modifying the intelligence and personality after birth that would have been predicted from the genome of the fetus. Mothers’ nutrition is thought to be of consequence in fetal development. But Stein, Susser, et al. (1975) found that test scores of 19-year-old Dutch males whose mothers had been exposed to three months of famine in the winter of 1944–1945, just before their sons were born, showed no evidence of depressed intelligence.
A meta-analysis by Judge, Bono, Ilies, et al. (2006) confirmed that personality variables are consistently correlated with the emergence and effectiveness of leadership. Some personality traits influence leaders’ ability to cope with the external environment facing them and their followers. This is their task competence, involving a cluster of cognitive traits (such as intelligence) and abilities. A second cluster involves their socioemotional traits, interpersonal competence, personality, and character. We will follow up Chapter 4 by considering the findings about both clusters as they relate to emergent and effective leadership. Table 5.1 shows the cognitive and socioemotional traits as well as the physical and character traits found to be related to leadership since 1970.
Character traits are increasing in importance in the study of leadership. For instance, in 1999 a survey of 1,354 leaders in New Zealand ranging from supervisors to CEOs found a correlation of .61 between the perceived leaders’ integrity and satisfaction with the leadership, .57 with leaders’ effectiveness, and .56 with motivation (Parry & Proctor, 2000).
Table 5.1 Traits Found Related to Leadership 1970–2005
Characteristics |
Number of Positive Findings |
Number of Zero or Negative Findings |
|
1948 Survey |
1970 Survey |
1948 Survey Only |
|
Physical Characteristics |
|||
Activity, energy |
5 |
24 |
|
Age |
10 |
6 |
8 |
Appearance, grooming |
13 |
4 |
3 |
Height |
9 |
|
4 |
Weight |
7 |
|
4 |
Social Background |
|
|
|
Education |
22 |
14 |
5 |
Social status |
15 |
19 |
2 |
Mobility |
5 |
6 |
|
Intelligence and Ability |
|
|
|
Intelligence |
23 |
25 |
10 |
Judgment, decisiveness |
9 |
6 |
|
Knowledge |
11 |
12 |
|
Fluency of speech |
13 |
15 |
|
Personality |
|
|
|
Adaptability |
10 |
|
|
Adjustment, normality |
|
11 |
|
Aggressiveness, assertiveness |
|
12 |
|
Alertness |
6 |
4 |
|
Ascendance, dominance |
11 |
31 |
6 |
Emotional balance, control |
11 |
14 |
8 |
Enthusiasm |
|
3 |
|
Extroversion |
5 |
1 |
6 |
Independence, nonconformity |
|
13 |
|
Objectivity, tough-mindedness |
|
7 |
|
Originality, creativity |
7 |
13 |
|
Personal integrity, ethical conduct |
6 |
9 |
|
Resourcefulness |
|
7 |
|
Self-confidence |
17 |
28 |
|
Strength of conviction |
7 |
|
|
Tolerance of stress |
|
9 |
|
Task-related Characteristics |
|
|
|
Drive to achieve, desire to excel |
7 |
21 |
|
Drive for responsibility |
12 |
17 |
|
Enterprise, initiative |
|
10 |
|
Persistence against obstacles |
12 |
|
|
Responsibility in the pursuit of objectives |
17 |
6 |
|
Task orientation |
6 |
13 |
|
Social Characteristics |
|
|
|
Ability to enlist cooperation |
7 |
3 |
|
Administrative ability |
|
16 |
|
Attractiveness |
|
4 |
|
Cooperativeness |
11 |
5 |
|
Nurturance |
|
4 |
|
Popularity, prestige |
10 |
1 |
|
Sociability, interpersonal skills |
14 |
35 |
|
Social participation |
20 |
9 |
|
Tact, diplomacy |
8 |
4 |
|
Competence, the capability that a person brings to a situation, may be a specific aptitude, ability, or knowledge relevant to meeting the requirements for successful performance in a particular setting (Boyatzis, 1982). It may invoke a person’s more generalized intelligence, which is of consequence in a broad spectrum of situations. Or it may concern a person’s understanding of how to realign an entire organizational culture (Tichy & Ulrich, 1983).
Those who consider themselves competent to deal with the tasks facing a group will be likely to attempt leadership. If the others agree with them about who has task competence, their attempts to lead will be successful. If these emergent leaders are actually task-competent, as they and others believe, their leadership will be effective—that is, the group will attain its objectives (Bass, 1960). But if the would-be leader’s opinion of his or her competence is not shared by the prospective followers, the attempt to lead is unwise and will fail—or if the person does emerge as a leader, his or her leadership will be ineffective. Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956, Michael Dukakis, and other also-rans have attempted to win the American presidency. Although they believed they had the competence to be president, the majority of the electorate disagreed with them and failed to support them.
This contribution of the leader’s technical competence to the group’s effectiveness has been given as one reason for Japan’s rapid competitive success globally after World War II, in contrast to U.S. industry. For instance, although most tenth-grade Japanese students can solve and graph simultaneous equations, far fewer U.S. university students are capable of doing so. Also, Japanese executives are more likely to have engineering degrees, whereas U.S. executives are more likely to have degrees in law or accounting (Tsurumi, 1983b). On the other hand, the greater emphasis in U.S. education on initiative and discovery results in greater creativity in general and greater success of efforts to change.
The differences in the task competencies of such leaders as Robert F. Scott and Roald Amundsen go a long way toward explaining why Amundsen’s team reached the South Pole first and returned in good order whereas Scott’s team, although it managed with great fortitude to reach the pole, failed to survive the return trip. Amundsen knew, from his own experience in polar exploration and the experiences of others, that a small crew of men on skis, using sleds hauled by Greenland dog teams, offered the best chance of success. Scott, who had not profited from his own or Ernest Shackleton’s past failures, tried to rely on Siberian ponies, motor sledges, and hauling by hand. Amundsen prepared for as many contingencies as he could; Scott, as on an earlier expedition, assumed the best and left little in reserve for emergencies (Huntford, 1984).
In distinguishing the transactional leader from the transformational leader, Downton (1973) noted that followers of a transactional leader are most willing to engage in “transacting goods” with the leader on the basis of their assessment that the leader can “grant them their most preferred choices.” The leader’s ability to do so requires task competence. As Downton (1973, p. 95) explained, “The greater a leader’s competence as perceived by the follower, the greater the probability that the follower will transact goods with him. We should expect the leader’s information, skills, and personal temperament to be important factors influencing the formation and maintenance of follower commitments. Competence to cope with the instrumental tasks of the group is an important criterion in selecting leaders, for it is through the leader’s successful performance of his instrumental functions that rewards are accumulated by individual followers.” Hambrick and Mason (1984) observed that when the senior managers of organizations have entrepreneurial experience, the firms will engage in more innovation of products and expansion of markets. Also, when senior managers are more educated, innovation is more likely (Becker, 1970; Kimberly & Evanisko, 1981). Analyses by Child (1974) and by Hart and Mellons (1970) found that the younger a corporation’s managers were, the greater was the corporation’s growth in sales and revenues. Profitability, however, was not affected. In a study of over 1,500 senior managers in 129 large firms in eight countries, Heller and Wilpert (1981) reported that the managers’ competence, as seen in their experience, qualifications, and skills, influenced the extent to which participative and democratic behavior occurred at other levels in their organizations. Nevertheless, such managerial competence tended to be underutilized, according to Heller and Wilpert.
The quantity of participation forecasts a person’s emergence as a leader because it is correlated with quality. But continued incompetent talk will not be reinforced by others. As will be noted Chapter 6, Sorrentino and Boutillier (1975) and Gintner and Linkskold (1975) found that the “windbag” or compulsive talker who lacks interpersonal or task competence will ultimately fail in attempting to lead. Hollander (1960) found that when a group is given tasks, its leader is usually evaluated with respect to his or her competence. This acknowledged competence builds up the leader’s credit, so the leader can subsequently depart from the group norms and move the group in novel ways, yet still be accepted by the group.
The most frequently obtained skill factors of leadership tended to involve task or socioemotional performance. Hollander (1978) observed that competent leadership included being a good facilitator, enabling others to make an effective contribution, having skill in handling the inner workings of the group, maintaining activities on a relatively smooth course, giving direction to activity, and acquainting followers with their roles in the main effort. The leader gives competent guidance to other group members concerning their jobs. He or she must be able to evaluate and discriminate between good and bad work.
Limerick (1976) offered a rigorous way to sort leadership in small groups into content or process that influenced performance. Similarly, Dunphy (1963), in a study of adolescent groups, identified two mutually supportive roles—leader and sociocenter. The leader was influential in group activities whereas the sociocenter relieved group tension. Again, using Bales’s method of observational ratings of the behaviors of actual leaders, Bales and Slater (1955) and Slater (1955) offered two types of leadership behaviors: socioemotional and task-oriented. As one rises in an organization, the task competence that is required changes from technical prowess to cognitive complexity and abstract capabilities. The need for socioemotional and interpersonal competence remains much the same at all levels (Boyatzis, 1982). Baron (2000) concluded that competent entrepreneurs think differently from other people. They are less likely to engage in counter-factual thinking, but they are more likely to be overconfident in their judgments. At the same time, they are better social perceptiveness and at adapting to new social situations.
Evidence continues to mount that generalized intelligence or mental ability contributes to emergence as a leader and effectiveness as a manager. But the evidence also indicates variations in the strength of the association for different situations. For example, Mandell (1950a) reported the following correlations between tested mental ability and performance as a civil service administrator: housing agency executives, .30 and .64; Veterans Administration executives, .52; navy executives, .13. Traits that were checked on adjective checklists correlated, respectively, for 95 males and 98 females with their emergence as leaders in initially leaderless group discussions as follows: clear thinking .38 and .43; clever, .49 and .54; wise, .42 and .30 (Gough, 1988).
As was seen in Chapter 4, intelligence generally is a positive indicator of competence. Much more specific information about its effects on leadership can be offered. For instance, its creative component becomes more important for leadership at higher levels of management.
General Intelligence. Schmidt and Hunter (1977) introduced theory and method to support the validity of the same particular ability or trait for predicting performance across a wide variety of situations. They argued that much of the variation observed from one situation to another requires correction for restriction in range and unreliability of the measurements. With this in mind, Cornwell (1983) and Lord, De Vader, and Alliger (1986) found from meta-analyses of the relationship that they could reach an even stronger conclusion than Stogdill (1948) or Mann (1959) about the importance of the personal trait—general intelligence—to leadership. Lord, De Vader, and Alliger used the data from 18 studies: those reviewed by Mann in 1959 and others published subsequently through 1977. Both Cornwell (1983) and Lord, De Vader, and Alliger concluded from their meta-analysis, after adjusting the studies for different sample sizes and errors of measurement, that the true mean correlation of general intelligence and being perceived as a leader was .50 across the different situations. These samples included male and female students in high school, college, and graduate school; management trainees and military cadets; and managers and salesmen.
In addition to cross-sectional studies, there is support from longitudinal predictions. Ball (1938) found that intelligence measures yielding an initial .50 correlation with leadership increased to .75 over a 10-year period. After a generation had passed, a follow-up of Terman’s (1925) assessment of 1,000 gifted children reported that during their careers, the highly intelligent were far more likely than most to obtain leadership positions and to perform effectively in them, as indexed by such diverse criteria as being admitted to honorary societies and earning military medals. Howard and Bray (1988) noted the importance of initially tested intelligence in the success of managers at AT&T in eight-year and 20-year follow-ups of the assessments of their accomplishments.
Intelligence is a general factor of cognitive abilities such as verbal, spatial, numerical, and reasoning ability. These cognitive abilities are intercorrelated and predict effective performance in a wide variety of assignments including managerial and supervisory jobs. For example, executives, or their speechwriters, have to be able to articulate in appealing and simple language what followers want or should want to do but may not be able to state clearly. Still, specific tests of abilities add little to the prediction of successful leadership beyond what is found with general intelligence, which includes verbal ability (Hunter, 1986). Lord, Foti, and De Vader (1984) obtained a correlation of .52 between intelligence and emergent leadership. Morrow and Stem (1990) and Hogan, Raskin, and Fazzini (1990), among many others, likewise found significantly positive correlations between intelligence and emergent leadership, as did Smith and Foti (undated). Hater and Bass (1988) found that ratings of inspirational leadership of midlevel managers by management committees correlated .30 with managers’ judgment scores and .23 with direct reports of ratings of their managers’ intellectual stimulation.
If a group is to be effective, generally there should be a positive correlation between the intelligence of the leader and that of the members. Conflict and failure are likely if the correlation is zero or negative. Ordinarily, we are likely to see greater intelligence among those at higher organizational levels. Requirements are greater and more complex at these levels, as is discretionary opportunity and the need to plan ahead for longer periods of time. A first-level supervisor may have to plan ahead for three days—a CEO, for 10 years (Jaques, 2000).
Practical Intelligence. Sternberg (2002) suggested that intelligence as usually measured might be even more predictive of leadership if it were not primarily linked to academic performance. He conceived of practical intelligence relevant to successful adaptation, shaping, and choice in everyday life and based on tacit knowledge (Sternberg, Wagner, & Okagaki, 1993). Tacit knowledge is acquired on one’s own; it is usually unspoken, implicit, procedural, and not readily articulated. It is directly related to valued practical goals. It is not at a matter of knowing formal rules. Tacit knowledge may be about managing oneself, others, and tasks. It may focus on short-term or long-term goals (Wagner & Sternberg, 1986). Generally, tests of tacit knowledge are situational-judgment inventories in which examinees choose among options for dealing with each situation (Wagner & Sternberg, 1991). Alternatively, answers may be obtained through interviews.
Tacit knowledge, like wisdom, increases with learning from experience. It is ordinarily uncorrelated with tests of multiple abilities and styles of personality and cognition. It can predict success on the job better than general intelligence tests do (Grigorenko, Gil, Jarvin, & Sternberg, 2000). Tacit knowledge correlates, .36 and .38 respectively, with the organizational level of managers in a high-tech firm and their compensation (Williams & Sternberg, 1996). Similar results have been obtained for bank managers (Wagner & Sternberg, 1985). The effectiveness of 368 platoon commanders and 163 company commanders as leaders was rated by superiors, peers, and subordinates. Additionally, 31 battalion commanders were rated by superiors and subordinates. Median correlations between practical intelligence scores and effective leadership ratings were highest (.42) for battalion commanders rated by their superiors and lowest (.17) for platoon commanders rated by their superiors (Hedlund, Forsythe, Horvath, et al., 1999).
Need for Pragmatic Intelligence. In a study of management students’ ability to set appropriate priorities, Gill (1983) concluded that the very bright students spent too much time and put too much emphasis on the exclusive use of logic and rationality in making their decisions. Those who were a bit lower in intelligence were more pragmatic. They could accept the fact that there were costs and limits to the search for alternatives and to their efforts to achieve completely logical solutions. If the brightest students had been more experienced, they might have been more willing to use less reasoning and more intuition in setting priorities. Pondy (1983) and Weick (1983) considered such pragmatic thinking and action basic to the effectiveness of an executive. The ability to think and act incrementally characterizes successful executives, who must unite the intuitive and the rational and respond to behaviors, not intentions or preconceptions. These executives need to be ready to take action, rather than depend on moving ahead solely by thinking about requiring judgments about obvious consequences of matters. In taking action, they need to pay close attention to what is happening and to take corrective steps as needed. They must be able to impose order and logic on situations in the absence of order and logic so as to consistently interpret what is happening.
Creative Intelligence. General intelligence has to do with how well one works with words, numbers, spatial orientation, and abstractions. There is also an independent factor—of creative intelligence—which can be measured by tests requiring judgments about obvious or remote consequences of actions and conditions, and which ask for the generation of unusual uses of objects (Guilford, 1967). Rusmore (1984) found that in comparison with general intelligence, creative intelligence is more predictive of success at higher levels of management than at lower levels (Rustmore, 1984). But although Dubinsky, Yammarino, and Jolson (1995) expected tranformational sales managers to be higher in abstact intelligence, they found just the opposite in a study of 140 sales subordinates’ ratings of their 34 sales supervisors’ abstract orientation—the ability to assess and evaluate critically ideas that seem vague or unformulated. Abstract orientation of the managers correlated between 2.36 and 2.42 with subordinates’ ratings of their managers’ transformational leadership.
Short-term and long-term storage of information are of considerable importance to the leader, especially the political leader. Willner (1968) found that most of the world-class leaders she studied projected “the image of unusual mental attainments.” Gandhi and Lenin were “genuine intellectuals,” but most of the others were primarily action-oriented. The majority displayed an abil-ity to seize on information and ideas from many sources and to use their excellent memory to store information and retrieve it when they needed it. Franklin Delano Roosevelt could soak up facts and ideas and impress coal miners with the details of their situation or businesspeople with the complexity of their firms. He was constantly searching for information and storing it for use when he needed it. Likewise, Mussolini had a prodigious memory with which he could startle and impress others.
Repeatedly, general managers, senior officials, and chief executive officers are praised for practicing walk-around management, in which they can recognize individually a large number of their employees, call them by their first names, and remember small details about them and their families.
Knowledge, such as how to evaluate a subordinate’s performance; skill, such as how to prepare clear instructions; and ability, such as how to program a computer, all may be involved in what a leader needs to help a group. In field studies with army combat squads performing a variety of field problems, Goodacre (1951); Greer, Galanter, and Nordlie (1954); and Havron and McGrath (1961) found that the characteristics of the squad leaders who were most highly associated with their units’ effectiveness included overall ability, knowledge of their jobs, and knowledge of their men.
Knowledge, skills, and abilities that are of consequence to leadership can be more fully detailed, given the multiple functions that may be involved in specific situations, such as serving as a prime minister, a general manager, a school principal, or a naval officer. Specific situations call for specific task competencies in the leader. Leaders with the specific competencies result in more effective groups. For instance, leaders of guidance groups that are made up of members with different kinds of problems must include among their competencies a great deal of flexibility (Hollander, 1978). At the same time, certain specialties provide an impetus to move individuals into positions of leadership. At least half the members of the U.S. Congress are lawyers. In medical schools, leadership tends to be in the hands of physicians who specialize in internal medicine; 42% of deans of medical schools in 1977 were internists (Wilson & McLaughlin, 1984).
To determine what distinguished the competencies of superior and average naval officers, Spencer (undated) and Winter (1978) identified officers’ activities according to the motivation and skills that were required to carry them out. This information could then be applied to selection and training. An analysis of approximately 800 incidents of leadership and management performance in a cross section of commissioned and noncommissioned naval officers identified 27 leadership and management competencies. The 27 competencies subsequently were grouped by factor analyses into five factors. Four of the five factors significantly predicted superior leadership and management performance in a new sample. These four factors, which differentiated between superior and average leadership and management performance, were: (1) competence in achieving tasks; (2) skillful use of influence; (3) management control; and (4) competent advising and counseling.1
Kaplan (1986) reported results of the content analysis of interviews with 25 general managers and executives who were asked to provide examples of effective and ineffective general managers. The respondents thought that effective general managers did better in strategic long-term thinking than in short-time crisis management and in communicating well. They judged the general managers to have more vision, a greater knowledge of business, and an ability to establish priorities. Similarly, Bryson and Kelley (1978) found that congressional leadership depend on a variety of competencies. Personality, style, and skill, along with political savvy, were deemed crucial in determining who becomes a congressional leader and who stays a leader. Clearly, effective leaders need to be alert and sensitive to circumstances which suggest that a problem exists. Political leaders must be able to read signals of discontent, of the seriousness of natural disasters, and of dangerous international currents. With the aid of their staffs, they must be able to diagnose properly the conditions of a problem so that they can formulate appropriate policy responses (Tucker, 1981). This ability to diagnose the social and technical aspects of problems, to attribute causes accurately, and to identify the elements of consequence in a situation may depend, to a considerable degree, on intuition, which will be discussed below.
The level of management achieved after 20 years by college graduates and non–college men in the AT&T Management Progress Study showed clearly that college education made a difference (Howard & Bray, 1989). Eleven percent of 137 college graduates reached the fifth and sixth levels of management after 20 years of service, but none of 129 non–college graduates reached these two highest levels. Only 23% of college graduates were still at the two lowest levels after 20 years with the company while 68% of non–college graduates remained at the lowest rungs on the managerial ladder. Higher levels of education were expected in those appointed to positions of leadership. Twelve nursing directors, 86 head nurses, and 267 staff nurses in 12 Egyptian hospitals agreed in their expectation that head nurses should have advanced education beyond the baccalaureate degree in clinical nursing and administration (Essa, 1983).
Many surveys document the importance of technical competence in leaders’ success and effectiveness. For instance, Penner, Malone, Coughlin, and Herz (1973) found that U.S. Army personnel were more satisfied with their officers and noncoms if they believed them to be technically competent. Farris (1971a) found that among 117 professionals at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, including 20 supervisors, those who were identified as informal leaders in the informal organization were technically more competent and in more active contact with their colleagues. They were also more motivated by the technical aspects of their work, better rewarded, and more influential in their work.
Bass (1960) proposed that groups will be more effective if the hierarchy of influence in a group matches the members’ abilities. Rohde (1954a, 1954b, 1954c) demonstrated this relationship in experimental groups in which members differed in their ability to perform a task. Rohde found that the group performed more effectively if the leader was qualified than if the leader was unqualified, regardless of the members’ abilities and ideas. It was more difficult for an unqualified leader than for a qualified leader to retain control of the group, especially when the members were similar in ability.
The link between the technical competence of the leader and the effectiveness of the group was also seen by T. G. Walker (1976), who examined leadership in state supreme courts. Walker found that when leaders were selected on the basis of their merit instead of seniority, the courts generated less dissent with their rulings. Additional results reported by Jackson (1953b) and by Rock and Hay (1953) suggested that the emergence of leaders was not a matter of chance, unjust discrimination, or keeping good people down. Both leaders and members appeared to recognize the leader’s potential for advancing the purpose of their groups. Also, groups were more effective if the leaders and members played the roles for which they were perceived to be best fitted.
Bugental (1964) found that participants who were trained in task-related skills emerged as leaders more often than untrained participants. G. J. Palmer (1962a, 1962b) studied groups in which the members differed in their ability to perform tasks. “Task ability” was related to successful leadership (the successful influencing of the performance of others) and still more strongly to effective leadership (achieving the goals of tasks). Hollander (1966) varied the characteristics of group leaders, including whether they were task-competent or task-incompetent, and found that leaders who were perceived as task competent by members exerted significantly more influence than those who were perceived as task-incompetent. Julian and Hollander (1966) reported that the willingness of group members to accept a leader’s attempts to influence them depended on the leader’s competence. However, Hollander and Julian (1970) found that a less competent leader would continue to be tolerated if he or she was seen as highly motivated to perform the tasks of the group.
Hollander (1964) assigned an ambiguous task to groups. After a first trial, the groups were required to predict what would occur in the next trail. A confederate planted by the experimenter played the role of deviate from the group norms but was provided with the correct answers. The confederate’s influence as a leader was measured by the number of trials in which his suggestion was accepted as the group’s choice. Such influence increased as the trials progressed despite the confederate’s violation of the group’s norms. Thus the members’ perceptions of the confederate’s ability influenced his emergence as a leader. Similarly, Goldman and Fraas (1965) assembled 32 student groups of four members each to solve discussion problems. The groups worked under four types of leadership: (1) leader appointed because of ability; (2) leader appointed arbitrarily; (3) leader elected by group members; and (4) no leader. The groups worked best in situations in which they perceived the leader to have been correct in previous situations.
In surveys of 176 senior U.S. Army officers, 256 supervisors and managers, 23 educational administrators, and 45 professionals, Bass (1985a) found uniformly that subordinates who described their supervisor as intellectually stimulating also said they exerted extra effort, were more satisfied with their leader, and regarded him or her as more effective. The same findings appeared in data-feedback surveys in a variety of firms, such as IBM, Digital Equipment, General Electric, and Federal Express (Bass & Avolio, 1989). Superiors also thought that such intellectually stimulating supervisors and managers had greater leadership potential (Hater & Bass, 1988).
In a study of 95 employees of a nonprofit organization, Podsakoff, Todor, and Schuler (1983) showed that the expertise attributed to the leader was critical to whether the leader’s instrumental and supportive behavior reduced the employees’ role ambiguities. That is, ordinarily such structuring of the paths of employees to their goals would have been expected to clarify what employees needed to do to carry out their role arrangements. But when the employees did not perceive the leader as having expertise, their sense of role ambiguity could not be reduced.
Kemp (1983) analyzed 94 questionnaires and 20 interviews of senior industrial and military executives who were concerned with the development of high technology. Kemp found that successful projects were led by project managers who, among other things, fully understood the technology and operational needs and could attract the support of professionally competent and experienced subordinates. Yukl (1998) suggested the same for lower-level supervisors: “Supervisors [of] the work of others need extensive knowledge of the techniques and equipment used by subordinates to perform the work. Technical knowledge of products and processes is necessary to plan and organize work operations, to direct and train subordinates with specialized activities, and to monitor and evaluate their performance” (Yukl, 1998).
Technical Competents Who Fail. Despite their technical competence, many supervisors and middle managers fail to rise in their organizations because of their socioemotional incompetence, according to interview research comparing those who succeed and those who fail. Failure was marked by discharge, transfer, or being “plateaued” until one quit or retired. Success was indicated by promotion to senior management. Failures exhibited neurotic traits: angry outbursts, moodiness, and inconsistency. They were defensive and blamed others for their mistakes or attempted to cover up their mistakes. They were self-aggrandizing and untrustworthy. They were abrasive, intimidating, arrogant, and insensitive. Those who succeeded were more flexible in shifting their focus as they rose in level and were more socially competent (McCall & Lombardo, 1983; Lombardo & McCauley, 1988). Nonetheless, on occasion one may be too competent. A candidate may be rejected as too educated or too intelligent or may be regarded as overqualified for a job.
Intuition is the ability to know directly without reasoning. It is an insight, a hunch, on the experience of seeming to learn in one trial without much awareness of how we have learned something. Since it depends more on induction, intuition allows leaders to deal with complexity and irrationality in the face of uncertainties and contributes to their innovative and creative abilities (Goldberg, 1983).
Barnard (1938) first called attention to the rational and the intuitive components of effective executive decisions. This work was carried forward and qualified by Simon (1947). Simon (1987) explained unconscious intuitive decision making in contrast to conscious rational decision making as being a consequence of the decision maker’s many earlier encounters with similar relevant circumstances. These earlier experiences built up relevant information that the decision maker could bring into play without awareness—leading to an instantaneous flash of insight, intuitive feeling, or assured judgment. In support, Simon called attention to Bhaskar’s (1978) demonstration that although experienced businessmen and novice business students reached the same conclusions about a business policy case, the businessmen did so much more quickly and intuitively. The novices were slower, more conscious, and more deliberate in their analyses.
In addition to explaining intuition in terms of relevant experiences, Simon (1987) noted that some limitations on the rationality of managerial decision making can be explained as a favoring of intuition over reason. Instead of rationally choosing between the lesser of two evils, managers will intuitively choose neither and postpone making a decision. Unlike MBA students, experienced managers are likely to redefine problems on an “in-basket” test rather than accept them as presented (Merron, Fisher, & Torbert, 1987). But the intuitive ability to recognize and quickly diagnose situations calling for remedial action is seen as important to the effective decision making of managers. According to Litzinger and Schaefer (1986), effective managers achieve a balance between analytical reasoning, and their insight and spontaneity. CEOs use strategic planning to lay the foundation for convincing boards of directors and senior management that their intuitively sensed direction for their firms is the right way to go. Justification for the plans is provided by logic and reason.
Agor (1986a, 1986b) surveyed several thousand managers in the public and private sectors. In comparison with lower-level managers, top managers indicated that they were more likely to depend on intuition in making key decisions. But a follow-up of 200 of the most highly intuitive top managers reported that these managers mixed intuition with analytical reasoning in reaching key decisions. Intuition was most often brought into play in making decisions regarding uncertain situations when little precedence existed, when facts and time were limited, when relevant variables were less predicatable, and when several plausible possibilities could be entertained.
Burke and Miller (1999) conducted a thematic analysis of interviews with 60 experienced executives holding important positions in a variety of U.S. organizations. The interviewers asked, “What does it mean to make decisions using your intuition?” Five themes emerged: First, consistent with other studies emphasizing the importance of experience, 56% said they made decisions intuitively after looking though their “central processing” unit to base their decision on past experiences. Second, 40% based their decisions on feeling and emotions. “Sometimes, I had a strange feeling that ‘something about the claim isn’t quite right’ and then I dug for more information and found the facts were not absolutely accurate as reported to me” (p. 92). Third, 23% mentioned applying congnitive skills, knowledge, and training in life and business school. Fourth, 11% said that subconscious mental processing led to an intuitively conscious decision to proceed without having available all the necessary information. Fifth, 10% said that the intuitive decision was a matter of ethics—personal or company values—a moral obligation that comes from within, without a book or manual to tell you what to do. Burke and Miller concluded that intuition may not be enigmatic or primarily the working of the subconscious mind.
Clemens and Mayer (1987) suggested that intuition may be the critical variable that separates the successful from the unsuccessful leader: “Those who ‘listen’ to their intuitive inner voice are far less likely than Othello to be manipulated by their Iagos’ ” (p. 120).
Intuition helps people anticipate the future—a trait that is important to successful leadership. In a study of 2,000 managers, top managers rated higher in intuition than managers at lower levels (Agor, 1984). All but one of 12 company presidents whose firms had doubled sales in the past four years scored high in a test of precognition, the intuitive ability to correctly sense what would happen next. Their counterparts with less impressive sales records scored lower in precognition (Rowan, 1986).
Bruce’s (1986) in-depth interviews with chief executive officers (CEOs) of 11 large corporations established that the CEOs intuitively set the tone and direction for their firms. Although they had staffs, senior management, and consultants to provide advice, the CEOs had to be able to make the important final strategic decisions by themselves. These intuitive decisions are difficult to articulate; as Simon (1987) suggested, they are likely to be a consequence of the possession of a great deal of relevant information. The CEOs had a “tremendous reserve of knowledge about their companies” (p. 21). General George Patton replied to the accusation that he made snap decisions by declaring, “I’ve been studying the art of war for forty-odd years. … A surgeon who decides in the course of an operation to change its objective is not making a snap decision but one based on knowledge, experience and training. … So am I” (Puryear, 1971, p. 382).
Closely allied to intuition are imagination, vision, and foresight. Imaginative ability has been seen as more important to Abraham Lincoln than intellectual brilliance (Hyman, 1954). Furthermore, imagination is shown, according to Woodrow Wilson, in a president’s capacity to predict the course of events, in the problems to which he calls national attention, in his sense of timing, in his appreciation of the gravity of a problem, and in the urgency he creates when he proposes a solution to it. Imagination is also shown in the way safety nets are built against misfortune and old forms are stretched to cover new functions without arousing excitement about a change. According to the Kirton Adaption-Innovation Inventory (Kirton & DeCiantis, 1986), a leader with an innovative cognitive style thinks tangentially; questions assumptions; and challenges rules, tradition, and consensus. The innovative leader views the need to change as an opportunity. He or she may be abrasive, but produce many ideas, some of which may be unsound and highly risky. Opposite to innovativeness is adaptivity. The adaptive leader is reliable, conforming, methodological, and prudent. He or she favors continuity, seldom challenges rules, and produces safe ideas for prompt implementation (Kirton, 1989).
Miller and Toulouse (1986) surveyed superiors (including the CEOs senior managers), peers, and subordinates of 97 firms in Quebec under 500 employees in size. The effectiveness of leadership was measured by these firms’ organizational success. Innovative decentralization in the firms correlated .23 with profitability, .47 with sales growth, and .38 with net income growth. Comparable results were obtained for a large Italian health organization led by a strategic team and an operating team engaged in leading major organizational changes over a five-year period (Previde & Rotondi, 1996). More will be said about imagination and vision in later chapters discussing charismatic and intellectually stimulating leadership.
Optimal Intelligence. “A president or would-be president must be bright but not too bright, warm and accessible but not too folksy, down to earth but not pedestrian” (Cronin, 1980, p. 14). There is an optimal level for intelligence and competence. As was noted in Chapter 4, the leader cannot be too superior in intelligence to those to be led. The leader must be more able to solve the problems of the group, but not too much more able. In the same way, the previously cited work of Shaw and Penrod (1962) and M. E. Shaw (1963a) showed that prospective leaders could be given too much information as well as too little information for optimal performance.
A number of factors may militate against the “too superior” member becoming a leader. Communications and understanding may be made difficult by the intellectual disparity of the leader and followers. If a leader is vastly superior in competence the would be leader may no longer appreciate the group’s problems or be concerned with helping to solve them. Rather than lead the group, he or she may withdraw from it. The ideas of the overly capable individual may call for too great a change in behavior by the group (Bass, 1960). Although the people who filled cabinet positions and other high governmental positions in the administration of John F. Kennedy were described as the “best and the brightest,” Halberstam’s (1983) study had to question why so many of their decisions and policies were later proved wrong. A lack of pragmatism in the very bright may be one reason.
Optimal Knowledge. Just as leaders may be too intelligent for the group, they can also have too much knowledge. When group members are overloaded with information, they can fail to lead effectively. Shaw and Penrod (1962) varied the amount of information provided to members of different groups. They found that the group’s performance improved when moderate amounts of diverse information were given to individual members, but it did not improve when these individuals received large amounts of such information. With large amounts of information, the highly informed members’ suggestions became implausible and unacceptable to the less-informed members. M. E. Shaw (1963a) obtained similar results in a comparison of groups in which one member was provided with either two units or six units of information. The specially informed member with two units of information entered the discussion earlier and initiated more task-oriented communication than the rest of the members of the group, but the situation was reversed for the member who received six units. The informed member was named more often as a leader in the two-unit group than in the six-unit group. Evidently, six units of information became an overload that impeded the informed member’s ability to lead.
Wisdom: Combining Intelligence and Knowledge. Research on wisdom has been increasing but is still sparse, probably because, as Sternberg (1990) noted, wisdom is so elusive. Webster (2001) constructed a reliable and valid self-report questionnaire, the Self-Assessed Wisdom Scale. He found that those with higher scores were more likely to consider many factors when making social judgments, were more concerned about guiding and mentoring the coming generation, and were not afraid to form intimate relationships.
Task competence has its limitations. For example, Justis (1975) found that the competence of a leader had less impact on the performance of members when they were less dependent on the leader. The technical competence of a supervisor may be less important to the group’s productivity if the supervisor consults with subordinates about decisions or allows them to share in decision making. Reeder (1981) found that for 78 clerks doing routine work and computer programmers doing nonroutine work for the U.S. Army in Germany, the supervisors’ knowledge of the clerks’ jobs was less causally related to the clerks’ and the programmers’ productivity than the supervisors’ participative leadership.
Election or Appointment. Election increases the demand for competence in a leader (Hollander, 1978). Hollander and Julian (1970) conducted a set of experiments concerned with competence and the election or appointment of a leader. Six hundred college students served as participants in various group discussion tasks. In the first experiment, the members’ perceptions of the leaders’ competence were more important than how the leaders had gained office. In the second experiment, although only the leaders’ competence was highly related to influence, the members tended to admit having been more influenced by elected than by appointed leaders. In the third experiment, the leaders were either elected or appointed to act as spokesmen for their groups. The elected incompetent leaders were rejected regardless of the group’s success or failure in the task, whereas the group’s success increased the endorsement of the elected competent leaders. The acceptance or rejection of appointed competent leaders was unrelated to the effects of their group’s success or failure, but incompetence resulted in rejection of the appointed leaders. Carter, Hay-thorn, Shriver, and Lanzetta (1951) also compared the performance of appointed and emergent leaders. Emergent leaders were more active than appointed leaders and tended to dominate the situation. Presumably, unlike the appointed leaders, they had to struggle for status.
Relevance of Competencies. Fundamental to situational analyses of leadership is the realization that the ability to solve the group’s problems is a relative matter. An ability relevant to solving problems of a group of farmers in Iowa may be irrelevant to solving the problems of a submarine crew, except to the extent that general intelligence may be important in both situations. As Bass (1960, pp. 174–175) noted, “A mathematician may be vastly superior to stevedores in the arithmetic of space, yet communication difficulties alone are likely to make it impossible for the math expert to supervise effectively the stevedores’ loading of the hold of a ship. Similarly, the mathematician may successfully serve as a head of a mathematics department but remain inadequate to solve the problems of a department of agricultural statistics. Ability of a member to help a group must be considered in light of the group’s problems. As J. F. Brown (1936) noted, the leader must be superior to other members in one or more characteristics relevant to the problems facing the group. And as Murphy (1941) concluded, the choice of leader is dictated by the needs of the group.”
Dubno (1963) observed that groups requiring high-quality decisions did better with leaders who were slow to make decisions, while groups that were under pressure for speedy decisions were more effective with leaders who were fast decision makers. Similarly, Carter, Haythorn, Shriver, and Lanzetta (1951) found that the behavior of leaders differed according to the tasks of their groups. In groups that had a reasoning task, leaders asked for information or facts; in groups with a mechanical-assembly task, leaders asked that things be done; in a discussion task, leaders asked for the expression of feelings or opinions.
Following his review of military leadership, W. O. Jenkins (1947) concluded that military leaders in a given field were superior to other members in skills pertinent to that field. To lead and earn esteem from skilled followers, it helps to be a master of the craft. Thus in one of the early experiments on the relation of task ability to leadership, Carter and Nixon (1949a, 1949b) found that scores on mechanical tests were related to the emergence of a leader in groups performing mechanical tasks. However, scores on tests of word fluency and clerical aptitude were correlated with the emergence of leaders in groups performing clerical tasks. No test of ability was uniquely related to the emergence of a leader in groups performing intellectual tasks.
Stein and Heller (1978) and Heller and Stein (1978) reviewed studies in which group members’ verbal interactions were categorized, through content analysis, according to the relevance of each of their statements to the ongoing group process. Emergent leaders were found to carry out a greater amount and variety of task-related behaviors than nonleaders. Leaders were found to be significantly more active than nonleaders in identifying problems; in proposing solutions to problems; in seeking information, opinions, or structure; in giving information or opinions; and in initiating procedures for the group’s interaction or accomplishment of tasks.
The traditional view of socioemotional and interpersonal competence emphasized the ability to socialize, to fit with group norms, to comply with authority, to avoid conflict, and to be polite and mannerly. A second view, propounded by the human relations movement, conceived of interpersonal competence as involving empathy, insight, heightened awareness, and the ability to give and receive feedback. Also included was openness to discussions about one’s feelings, consensual solutions to conflict, and the development of commitment to actions (Argyris, 1962). Managers with interpersonal competence were considered less willing to depend on power than on trust and shared decision making (Zaleznlk, 1965b). It is the second meaning of interpersonal competence that will be accented here. A third meaning, implying the competence to manipulate others, will be looked at more fully in Chapter 7.
Everyday experience suggests that people differ in interpersonal competence. Yet beginning in 1920 with E. L. Thorndike (Thorndike & Stein, 1937), the effort to measure and investigate interpersonal competence empirically has been difficult. Earlier researchers found it hard to discriminate between social intelligence and general intelligence. Still, Erez (1980) was able to assess the social intelligence of 45 Israeli managers and to show how it related to their tendency to be employee-centered rather than job-oriented leaders.
Empathy has long been recognized as part of interpersonal competence, but as will be shown later in this chapter, efforts to measure empathy have been fraught with difficulty (Hogan, 1969). Virmani and Mathur (1984) conceived of “vivek,” the ability to evaluate the implications of the attitudes, needs, desires, and intentions of others and oneself. Vivek, which is associated with effective leadership and management, is a fluid ability in that it can perceive complex relationships in human interactions in new environments.
The quality of one’s verbal and nonverbal communication has been seen as contributing to overall interpersonal competence (Rosenthal, 1979b), along with the fear of negative evaluation (Watson & Friend, 1969) and apprehension about communication (McCroskey, 1977). Self-monitoring (Snyder, 1974) also involved basic social skills (Lennox & Wolfe, 1984).
With support from a factor analysis of a lengthy self-report by 339 male and female undergraduates, Riggio (1986) found seven basic socioemotional skills to be of consequence: (1) emotional expressivity (“I have been told that I have ‘expressive’ eyes); (2) emotional sensitivity (“It is nearly impossible for people to hide their true feelings from me”); (3) emotional control (“I am very good at maintaining a calm exterior, even when upset”); (4) social expressivity (“I usually take the initiative and introduce myself to strangers”); (5) social sensitivity (“While I was growing up, my parents were always stressing the importance of good manners”); (6) social control (“I find it very easy to play different roles at different times”); and (7) social manipulation (“If I really have to, I can ‘use’ other people to get what I want”).
Interpersonal competence is manifested in understanding of, caring for, and consideration for others. It is revealed in communicating easily and clearly and in fostering and maintaining good relations with others. It serves to increase harmony, reduce tension, and resolve conflict. Compared with interpersonally incompetent leaders, interpersonally competent leaders are influential but not dictatorial, good at dealing with people and at delegating. They are trustworthy and credible rather than overly political (Kaplan, 1986). They promote group decisions, not to keep their subordinates happy but to take full advantage of their followers’ knowledge. They increase their subordinates’ commitment to decisions (Lombardo, Ruderman, & McCauley, 1987). According to Hogan and Hogan (2002), everyone wants acceptance and status, and leaders are better at obtaining these. Hogan and Hogan see interpersonal competence as including social skills—empathy, communications abilities, and social astuteness—essential to leadership.
Interpersonal competencies discriminated between effective and ineffective managers above and beyond situational effects (Boyatzis, 1982). J. Hogan and Holland (1998) found correlations of a CPI Empathy scale with five criteria of leadership between .45 and .73 for 25 managers at a large retail firm. Also, Baron (1989) ascertained that interpersonally competent members of small groups were more likely than other members to resolve conflicts and emerge as leaders.
Connelly, Gilbert, Zaccaro, et al. (2000) obtained open-ended responses to questions about problem scenarios in order to predict leaders’ effectiveness. Ability measures of complex problem-solving skills, social judgment, and knowledge were obtained from ratings of the responses. These “constructed” responses added to the prediction of career achievement of a sample drawn from 1,807 U.S. Army officers at six grades in rank. This added validity was beyond that accounted for by measures of cognitive ability, motivation, and personality according to a series of hierarchical regression analyses.
Although a multinational sample of faster-climbing managers did not see as much value in being interpersonally competent as did managers whose advancement in their careers was slower, the faster climbers rated themselves higher than the slower climbers in “understanding why I do what I do” (Bass, Burger, et al., 1979). Hall and Donnell (1979) compared 1,884 managers who were either fast, medium, or slow in their career advancement; these researchers found that more rapid promotion was directly related to the self-rated ability to relate effectively with others. Similarly, Wolberg (1977) noted that the potential to be a group leader was directly linked to the ability to relate as a peer in role playing and to avoid immature “acting out” during training.
Hogan and Hogan (2002) believe there is a general fac-tor of sociopolitical intelligence, which is a generalized ability to take roles (Mead, 1934). It is at the core of social skill and of the ability to build and maintain a team. Hogan and Hogan cited research support from Conway (1999). Conway factor-analyzed 2,000 360-degree benchmarks—management appraisals of trainees at the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL)—and found that four of the five factors involved leadership and social skills. The fifth factor involved strategic thinking. By 1946, R. B. Cattell (1946) had applied factor analyses to responses to personality questionnaires. He generated 16 factors, many of which were found to be related to leadership in subsequent studies. Similarly, Guilford (1952) generated 10 factors—again, many of these were related to leadership. They included general activity, mood swings, ascendancy, sociability, emotional stability, thoughtfulness, and masculinity. Scholars, consultants, and leaders themselves produced many different lists of traits they felt were required for leadership. These were based on experience, published research, or both (Bray & Howard, 1983; Boal & Hooijberg, 2001; Atwater & Yammarino, 1993; Hogan, Curphy, & Hogan, 1994; O’Roark, 2000; Quinn, 1988). Warren Bennis (quoted in Norris, 1992) felt that in choosing managers, large organizations emphasize technical competence, “people skills,” and conceptual skills. But additionally, they ought to focus more on judgment, taste, and character, along with sense of purpose, caring, constancy, competence, optimism, ambition, and integrity. After reviewing the literature on traits of leadership, Kirkpatrick and Locke (1991) listed drive involving achievement, ambition, energy, tenacity, and initiative—the personalized and socialized motivation to lead. Likewise, honesty, integrity, and self-confidence were listed as important. Also included were emotional stability, cognitive ability to marshal and interpret information, and knowledge of “the business” of the organization. Other traits, for which there was less support, included creativity, originality, and flexibility. By 1986, such lists could be replaced by a more rigorous and reliable analysis of accumulated evidence through the use of meta-analysis.
Meta-Analysis. This method pools the results of a number of separate research analyses. It provides statistical estimates of the average effects of variables from different research studies. The estimates are based on the much larger size of the pooled results and offer more confidence about the relationship in question—in this case, for instance, showing the likely average correlation between, say, managers’ assessed friendliness and their effectiveness as leaders. The correlations are weighted according to the number of cases contributing to them. They are also corrected for the reliability of the variables and their restrictions in range to obtain the true estimate, which is likely to be somewhat higher than the observed average. Confidence intervals of the true correlations are also provided to determine the probability that a correlation is not zero.
Meta-analyses of the Socioemotional Traits of Leadership. Lord, Devader, and Alliger (1986) conducted the first meta-analysis of traits of leadership. Their data were drawn from 18 studies about the emergence of leadership reviewed by Stogdill (1948) and Mann (1959).2
Studies through 1977 were added. The traits of consequence included intelligence, dominance, masculinity, extroversion, and better adjustment. A number of other meta-analyses have followed. The most comprehensive, described later, were conducted by Judge, Bono, Ilias, et al. (2002) and Judge, Colbert, and Ilias (2004).
Although Tupes and Christal (1961) and Norman (1963) first found evidence for the validity of the “Big Five” factor structure, it did not become a hot research topic until the 1990s, when it was shown to be a reliable and valid model for describing the most important socioemotional aspects of personality. Each of the Big Five factors contains six traits or facets. By the end of the decade, the factor model had been validated for predicting various criteria such as job performance in eight meta-analyses (e.g., Barrick & Mount, 1991). McCrae and Costa (1992) developed the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) as a standard for measuring the Big Five factored trait structure from a lengthy questionnaire. The five factors were: N, neuroticism versus emotional stability; E, extroversion or surgency versus introversion; O, openness to experience (called by others intellect, imagination, or culture); A, agreeableness versus antagonism; and C, conscientiousness or the will to achieve.
Neuroticism is the extent to which persons tend to experience distress, emotionality, worry, nervousness, insecurity, and tension. Neurotics view the world, themselves, and others negatively (George, 1996). They are likely to be pessimists (Williams, 1997). Other names for this factor include “lack of emotional stability” and “negative affectivity.” The traits of the intercorrelated subscales or facets of the neuroticism factor that can be scored separately include anxiety, hostility, depression, self-consciousness, impulsiveness, and vulnerability (Costa, 1994).
Extroversion is the extent to which persons tend to be assertive, gregarious, and enthusiastic (Barrick & Mount, 1993) and feel themselves to be efficacious. They are optimistic and tend to experience positive moods and emotions. They view others and the world favorably (George, 1996). Other terms for this factor are “social boldness” and “social presence.” The six facets are warmth, gregariousness, assertiveness, activity, excitement-seeking, and positive emotions.
Openness to experience involves imagination, artistic sensibility, and intellect. Another name is “intellectance.” Its six facets are fantasy, aesthetics, feelings, actions, ideas, and values (Costa, 1994).
Agreeableness is the extent to which a person is sympathetic, trusting, cooperative, warm, loving, affiliative, and good-natured. Its facets are trust, straightforwardness, altruism, compliance, tender-mindedness, and modesty (Costa, 1994). Highly modest self-presenters are favored by audiences if the presenters are female; moderately modest self-presenters are favored if they are male (Wosinska, Dabul, Whetson-Dion, et al., 1996).
Conscientiousness is the extent to which a person is dependable, responsible, hardworking, persevering, efficient, needing to achieve, prudent, ambitious, and organized (Barrrick & Mount, 1993). Facets include competence, order, dutifulness, striving for achievement, self-discipline, and deliberation (Costa, 1994). (For more about the NEOAC structure, see Digman, 1990; Eysenck, 1970; Goldberg, 1993; Guilford, 1975; Hough, 1992; McCrae & Costa, 1987; Peabody & Goldberg, 1989; and Tellegen, 1985.)
Goldberg (1993) developed a checklist of 100 adjectives, and Saucier (1994) reduced these to the Mini-Marker, a 40-item adjective checklist that when scored provides the same NEOAC factor results but with a little less reliability. Different labels may be attached to the factors. For example, adjustment may be substituted for emotional stability and lack of neuroticism; intellectance may be substituted for openness to experience. Facets are similar (Curphy, 2001).
Factorial validity was evidenced because each facet scale correlated much more highly with its appropriate factor than the other four factors. The NEOAC factorial structure displays considerable universality (MacCrae & Costa, 1997). As a demonstration of the construct validity of NEOAC, MacCrae, Zonderman, et al. (1996) compared the varimax-rotated factorial structures extracted from large adult and student samples in seven languages and cultures: American, German, Portuguese, Hebrew, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Orthogonal rotation using the normative American factorial structure generated average factor congruence coefficients across the other six cultures for N, E, O, A, and C ranging from .94 to .96. The Big Five factors tend to have low correlation with each other, demonstrating their discriminant validity (McCrae & Costa, 1990). The structure may have a biological basis (Eysenck, 1967). For many years, Eysenck advocated a two-factor theory of neuroticism and extroversion with a biological basis. Convergent validity was found when each factor scale correlated with relevant scales from other personality tests and inventories. Discriminant validity was seen in the expected greater correlation of a facet with its relevant measure on another test or inventory. For instance, the facet of assertiveness was correlated more highly with being forceful, enthusiastic, and confident on the Gough and Heilbrun Adjective Check List, compared with adjectives about other aspects of extroversion.
Supporting consensual and construct validation, coefficients of congruence of the Big Five factors were between .96 and .98 for a replication of the NEOAC with a sample of 211 people in sales, customer service, and lower, middle, and upper management. Additionally, performance evaluations of their successful interpersonal relations, their task orientation, and the adaptive capacity of their performance evaluated by their supervisors correlated significantly with their conscientious score. Their successful interpersonal relations and their adaptive capacity increased with conscientiousness and decreased with neuroticism. The facets of competence, striving for achievement, and self-discipline were the highest in correlation with the performance evaluations (Piedmont & Weinstein, 1994). Numerous theoretically expected consistencies were found between the Adjective Check List and NEOAC (Piedmont & Weinstein, 1993).
The Big Five and Leadership. Judge, Bono, Ilies, et al. (2002) tested how well the Big Five model provided an adequate structure for the socioemotional traits of leadership, excluding intelligence and other capabilities. The criteria they predicted were emergent leadership, effective leadership, and transformational leadership. These investigators searched the PsychINFO database, 1887 to 1999, for articles on leadership and personality. They also searched for articles on personality, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, and openness to experience. Results were added from 48 additional traits mentioned in the third edition of this handbook (Bass, 1990), along with traits found in articles in Leadership Quarterly from the first to the tenth volume and the studies used by Lord, Devader, and Alliger (1986). A total of 1,200 abstracts were identified. Studies of opinion and fashion leadership were excluded, as were many others that did not provide correlations or sufficient data to calculate them. Extracted for analysis were 275 correlations from 79 studies and 15 doctoral dissertations. A wide variety of data on emergent and successful leadership were included, ranging from teachers’ reports and peer ratings of student leadership to election of leaders in informal and formal groups. Studies using indexes of management such as salary level or organizational grade were excluded. Barrick and Mount’s (1991) coding procedure was used to categorize traits with many different names into a coherent whole. For instance, as suggested by Hogan, Curphy, and Hogan (1994), the need for power was classified as a measure of extroversion. In addition to obtaining results for the broader Big Five, results were obtained for the more specific facets in the model, such as dominance and sociability. A study was included in the correlational analyses if it compared leaders and nonleaders in emergent, effective, or transformational leadership. Huffcutt, Roth, and McDaniel (1994) presented for each of the Big Five factors the number of correlations, the number of respondents, and the estimated true correlations, corrected for reliability, restriction in range, and the sharply skewed weightings of the 76 correlations based on the total numbers of cases contributing to each of the five factors, ranging from 8,314 to 18,830. The reliability of the Big Five personality factors ranged from .78 to .86.
The corrected average correlations between each of the Big Five personality factors and leadership were as follows: neuroticism, 2.32; extroversion, .30; openness, .25; agreeableness, .10; conscientiousness, .19. Confidence intervals indicated a high probability that all five correlations were not zero. The multiple correlation was .47 for predicting leadership based on combining the optimally weighted five factors. Specific facets with substantial correlations with criteria of leadership included sociability, .38; dominance, .36; achievement, .36; and dependability, .32.
The criteria and samples of leadership analyzed made some difference. For government and military leaders, agreeableness correlated close to zero with the emergence of leadership, but .23 and .27, respectively, with leadership effectiveness and transformational leadership. Neuroticism correlated 2.19, 2.26, and 2.21, respectively, with emerging, effective, and transformational leadership. Extroversion was most predictive (.34) of emerging leadership and somewhat less predictive of effectiveness (.23) and transformational leadership (.25). In other studies, Caliguri (2000) found that the conscientiousness scores of 94 supervisors of 280 expatriate employees correlated positively with 360-degree ratings of the supervisors’ performance. McDaniel (1992) found that openness correlated .37 with the success of 162 change leaders. As rated by others, emotional stability correlated .32 with leaders’ self-reports of success.
Martinsen (2000) calculated the stepwise multiple regressions of N, E, O, A, and C and their interactions on 360-degree ratings of entrepreneurial leadership orientation by 94 managers, 80 supervisors, 307 peers, and 426 subordinates. For example, N(2) 1 0 1 A (2), optimally weighted, accounted for 17.7% of the variance in the ratings of entrepreneurial orientation of the leaders. N 1 E 1 A plus the interactions N 3 E and E 3 A, optimally weighted, accounted for 19.3% of the 360-degree ratings of the task orientation of the leaders. N 1 E 1 O 1 A 1 C 1 N 3 A 1 O 3 C, optimally weighted, accounted for 33.4% in the variance of the leaders in dominance behavior.
Makiney, Marchioro, and Hall (1999) found some significant correlations between the 40-item Mini-Marker rendition of NEOAC and the self-reported Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) for 69 undergraduates and other measures of leadership. N (2) emotional stability correlated .23 with transformational leadership. Extroversion correlated .40 with transformational leadership, 2.31 with laissex-faire leadership, and .28 with students’ self-schemata of social influence. 0, openness to experience, correlated .24 with the same self-schemata and .20 with leadership ranking in the class. A, agreeableness, correlated .32 with leadership ranking and the self-schemata of dedication. A, antagonism, correlated .25 with laissez-faire leadership. C, conscientiousness, correlated .20 with the leadership self-schemata of dedication.
Given the research interest in the Big Five, we will use its structure to present additional single and multiple personality studies since 1970 correlated with leadership. Many have appeared as facets of the Big Five.
“Social intelligence” was a term in use before 1950 but then fell out of favor. However, Gardner (1985) defined social intelligence as the ability to distinguish other people’s moods, temperaments, motivations, and intentions among others. It is the ability to understand others and act accordingly (Sternberg, 1985). It is also the wisdom to act at the appropriate time and in the appropriate way on the basis of this understanding (Boal & Hooijberg, 2001). For Zaccaro, Gilbert, Thor, et al. (1991), the social intelligence of successful leaders comprises social perceptiveness and behavioral flexibility. I will take the liberty of using social intelligence as the sum total of social competencies, including dominance, sociability, communicating styles, empathy, sensitivity, tact, and other interpersonal skills. Especially strong associations are found with communication styles and skills (Bass, 2002).
Dominance. Dominance tended to appear in lists of the traits of leadership drawn up in the 1970s and later (e.g., Hughes, Ginnet, & Curphy, 1993) but was less frequent as a subject of empirical investigations. This may have been due to an increased interest in democratic participation as opposed to autocratic directive leadership. One of the new empirical efforts was that of Stricker and Rock (1998). They developed a set of scales, including a dominance scale, from the biographical information supplied by freshmen at the U.S. Naval Academy. The internally consistent and validated items on dominance included affirmative answers to such questions as these: “Your parents told you that you did not take ‘no’ for an answer.” “You told classmates or friends that they did not stand up for their rights enough.” “Classmates or friends told you that you were not interested in other people’s ideas and opinions.” The dominance scale correlated .57 with a biographical sociability scale and .39 with a similarly constructed emotional ability scale. The dominance scale correlated .82 with peer ratings of leadership. Lord, DeVader, and Alliger (1986) thought that Stogdill (1948) and Mann (1959) had both underestimated the correlation of the personal trait of extroversion and leadership. They conducted a meta-analysis of reports of different types of subjects and situations that related extroversion and leadership. This meta-analysis adjusted the grand mean of results for the sample sizes and various errors attenuating each of the obtained correlations. The researchers estimated that the true mean correlation between extroversion and leadership was .26 across the different samples of subjects and situations. The results for dominance and leadership were less supportive of the importance of the trait of dominance across situations, however; the estimate of the true mean correlation was .13.
Butt and Fiske (1968) recognized that dominance could be socialized or aggressive. Different personality scales of dominance emphasized one possibility or the other. Gough’s (1957) dominance scale in the California Personality Inventory (CPI) assessed socialized dominance related to leadership in high school. Cattell, Saunders, and Stice’s (1957) dominance scale in their Sixteen Personality Factors (16PF) assessed “an aggressive onslaught on the environment by a rather solemn, isolated, and egotistical person” (Butt & Fiske, 1968, p. 513). It would seem that if both scales were used to predict transformational and transactional leadership, the leadership would be true leadership when predicted by the CPI, and pseudo leadership when predicted by the 16PF.
Montagner, Arnaud, et al. (1973) observed differences in children. Socially dominant children were the center of attention, threatened only for short periods of time, and were conciliatory. They were more likely to exert leadership and to be imitated by other children. The aggressively dominant engaged in much physical violence. They were highly self-oriented and spread fear in the other children with their threats. They were less likely to display leadership.
Socialized and Aggressive Dominance. Kalma, Visser, and Peters (1993) developed and validated factored scales of socialized and aggressive dominance, averaging results from seven Dutch samples ranging in size from 100 to 550. Statements such as “I have no problems talking in front of a group” loaded highest on socialized dominance (SD), and “I can look everybody in the eye, and lie with a straight face” loaded highest on a second factor, aggressive dominance (AD). In the first sample, students engaged in trios. They said they got their own way with simple statements if they scored high in socialized dominance (r 5 .28) but not aggressive dominance. (r 5 .04). Conversely, ADs were more likely than SDs to say that they got their way by being persistent, being persuasive, bargaining, threatening, being deceitful, being evasive, and using hints. The correlations of observers’ ratings with AD factor scale scores ranged from .20 to .37. The correlations of observers with SD factor scale scores ranged from 2.15 to .10. Observers noted that SDs (compared with ADs) looked more at the person to whom they were speaking (r 5 .39 versus r 5 216), held a prolong gaze (r 5 .29 versus r 5 .10), and gesticulated (r 5 .33 versus r 5 2.4) ADs were more likely than SDs to interrupt others (.23 versus .13), raise their eyebrows (.28 versus .14), and express doubt (.30 versus .11). On self-reports, SDs were more likely than ADs to consider themselves and other people friendly (r 5 .41, .40 versus r 5 2.19, 2.14). They were less likely than ADs to seek approval from others (r 5 2.40 versus r 5 2.30). SDs rated themselves higher than ADs did on task leadership (r 5 .38 versus r 5 2.03); ADs rated themselves lower on socioemotional leadership than did SDs (2.23 versus .17). Peers rated ADs higher on task leadership but lower on socioemotional leadership (.24 versus 224).
Emotional Intelligence. The competency model is a recipe for a good leader, although there is a wide range of opinion on what should be included. Ashkanasy and Tse (2000) theorized that emotional intelligence correlated with transformational leadership and its factorial components. George (2000) agreed that emotional intelligence correlated with effective leadership and its developing collective goals and encouraging flexibility. Cherniss and Goleman (2001) held that successful leaders model emotional intelligence. Caruso, Mayer, and Salovey (2002) qualified the relationship, suggesting that effective leadership could occur in the absence of emotional intel ligence or that only some elements of emotional intelligence might be present. Church (1997) that in comparison with average-performing managers, highly effective managers’ self-ratings were more in agreement with those of their subordinates. Dasborough, Ashkanasy, and Boyle (2002) theorized that emotionally intelligent followers could discriminate between the intentions of truly transformational leaders and self-oriented pseudo-transformational leaders who try to mislead their followers (Bass & Steidlemeier, 1999).
Salovey and Meyer (1990) introduced the concept of emotional intelligence as the ability to monitor the feelings and emotions of oneself and others to help guide one’s own thinking and actions. Goleman (1995, 1998) popularized “emotional intelligence” as a term encompassing a limited number of socioemotional abilities and traits, including self-awareness; handling one’s own feelings and impulses; motivating others; showing empathy; and remaining connected with others through optimism, enthusiasm, and energy. Emotional intelligence implies to think positively, understand relationships, and resolve conflicts.
The scope of the concept of emotional intelligence remains controversial. It may be seen as an ability to solve emotional problems as a competency mixes observed abilities, traits, and socioemotional behaviors. The ability model points to success in (1) perceiving and identifying emotions in the thoughts of oneself and others; (2) using emotions to think creatively and make decisions; (3) understanding and interpreting meaning in emotions, being open to feelings, avoiding defensiveness, and reflectively monitoring emotions.
The competency model points to: (1) self-awareness: emotional awareness and accurate self-assessment; (2) self-regulation: self-control, trustworthiness, conscientiousness, and innovativeness (Caruso, Mayer, & Salovey, 2002).
The ability model is favored because of its greater psychometric acceptability. The psychometric properties of the competency model are more problematic, since this model is often a collection of various self-ratings (Daus & Ashkanasy, 2003).
Sociability and Leadership. Sociability was included in the lists of traits of consequence to leadership drawn up by Kirkpatrick and Locke (1991), Hughes et al. (1993), and O’Roark (2000). It was a facet of extroversion in the NEOAC factor analyses, which figured even more strongly in leadership behavior (see Bass, 1998, on ascendancy). Stricker and Rock (1998) developed biographical information scales of emotional stability, need for achievement, self-confidence, and sociability. Sociability correlated highest with peer ratings of leadership (.28). Avolio and Bass (1994) obtained a correlation of .25 between the Gordon Personal Profile (GPP) sociability score of 188 leaders in a community and their followers’ ratings of their charismatic leadership. Elsewhere, in a review of empirical investigations, Bass (1998, p. 125) found that sociability contributed to inspirational motivation, individualized consideration, and contingent rewarding by leaders.
Competence in Communicating. Communication competencies are basic to leadership (Barge & Hirokawa, 1989). The leader needs to be able to communicate to followers the framing and interpretation of experiences (Bowman & Deal, 1991). Comrey, High, and Wilson (1955b) found that “high-producing” supervisors in the aircraft industry communicated effectively. Alpander’s (1974) survey of 217 corporations to determine which training needs were the highest priorities for currently employed managers found that oral communication abilities were rated highest. Mold (1952) reported that 490 industrial supervisors stated that they needed the most development in “how to sell ideas to my superior.” And satisfaction with the effectiveness of officers and noncoms among over 30,000 U.S. Army personnel was strongly associated with their ability to communicate effectively with their subordinates, according to ratings by their superiors and subordinates (Penner, Malone, Coughlin, & Herz, 1973). The quality and style of a leader’s communications to followers makes a difference in the success and effectiveness of the leadership.
Quality of Communications. Being active as a communicator is not enough. The quality of communicating with others is an important trait and competence of leaders. The quality of communication may be a matter of socioemotional competence as well as task competence, in which it is akin to oral and written fluency. Knowing something is not the same as being able to transfer the information to another individual or to transfer it to that person’s satisfaction. Communicating goes beyond verbal fluency. A listener’s acceptance of a message from an anchor on a televised news program is likely to depend considerably on how the anchor looks and how the message is delivered. President Reagan was known as the “great communicator” more for his perceived affability and the sincerity of his delivery than for his accuracy. President George W. Bush was known for mispronunciations and stumbling even when he was reading his speeches, yet he managed to remain popular during his first five years in office.3
Talking a lot in initially leaderless situations may result in the emergence of a leader, but the effectiveness of a leader will depend on the quality of the talk. Considerable evidence has been accumulated to demonstrate the connection between competence in articulation and effectiveness as a leader and manager. For instance, from 200 interviews with successful corporate leaders, Kanter (1983) found that the leaders had a number of communication skills in common. They were consistently able to expand their thinking by actively soliciting new ideas and feedback from others and were continually reaching out for new information. Also, they knew how to persuade others about the quality of their ideas and had the ability to communicate persuasively to others and to enlist their support by persistently working for it.
In a field setting, Klimoski and Hayes (1980) surveyed 231 editorial subordinates and their 15 assistant managers who abstracted current technical publications. Among the supervisory behaviors noted were explicitness in giving instructions and frequency of communication about job-related matters. The managers’ explicitness correlated significantly with the subordinates’ expectations of success and reward in their jobs, but frequency of communication did not. Explicitness correlated .57 with the subordinates’ satisfaction with supervision, but frequency of communicating correlated only .19 with such satisfaction. The managers’ explicitness correlated 2.44 and 2.30 with the subordinates’ role ambiguity and role conflict. Frequency correlated .04 with each of these measures of problems in doing their jobs. The managers’ explicitness contributed to the subordinates’ self-rated effort; frequency did not.
Snyder and Morris (1984) were able to link the quality of supervisors’ communications in 12 offices of a social service agency with the quality of services rendered by the agency and with lower costs of operations. Colleagues used a reliable four-item questionnaire that was based on previous work by Olmstead and Christensen to rate supervisors on the quality of their communications. The overall quality of the supervisor as a communicator contributed significantly to lower costs of operation, even after adjustments for the different numbers of clients served and the size of the different offices. Ward (1981) collected data from first-line supervisors in two manufacturing plants, three libraries, and two hospital nursing departments. The main concern was the supervisors’ rhetorical sensitivity—their creative invention of effective discourse in writing and speaking. Ward found that the supervisors’ rhetorical sensitivity correlated positively with the satisfaction of their subordinates.
Ability to Convey Meaning and to Enhance Retention. Getting across the meaning of a message is crucial and may require innovative approaches by the leader. The feelings as well as the ideas in the message need to be communicated effectively (Bennis & Nanus, 1985); also, the messages have to be remembered. According to survey studies, the messages sent by leaders that become memorable—are influential and are remembered for a long time—are brief oral injunctions such as, “Work smarter, not harder” or “No matter what the other girls are doing, act like a lady” (Knapp, Stohl, & Reardon, 1981). All 65 employees and managers of one firm interviewed by Stohl (1986) could recall such a memorable message. The messages were almost all single sentences and tended to be rules. The employees usually first heard the messages soon after joining the firm, and in a private one-to-one conversation. If an appropriate situation arose, the recipients said they would pass the message on in the same way. A majority of messages in this organizational setting dealt with role behavior and were applicable to various situations. One such message was “If you’re not helping, you’re hindering.” These pithy, memorable messages, usually from a sender of higher status to a recipient of lower status, provide “sense-making” structures and a guide to what behavior is appropriate in an organization. Memorable messages, content-analyzed, provide information about the norms, values, expectations, rules, requirement, and rationality of an organization’s culture. Clearly, a manager who includes such memorable messages in his or her communications is likely to have a much greater impact on subsequent events in the organization.
Consistency of Statements. Inconsistency of contributions may not be as deleterious as one might expect. Contrary to their hypothesis, Goldberg and Iverson (1965) found that the influence wielded by high-status members depended on their status, rather than on the consistency of their statements. They did not lose influence if they changed their opinions several times during a discussion.
Timing. The timing of participation makes a difference in the influence of the participation on others. Leana (1985) and M. Smith (1935a) noted the importance of opportunity. Someone who succeeds as a leader may be but one of several in a group who might have been just as successful had they been present to attempt leadership first. Hollander (1978) concluded that to emerge as a leader, one needs to participate early. But M. E. Shaw (1961) found that the members of a group who stated their opinions either early or late were better able to have their opinions accepted than those who stated their opinion in the middle of a discussion. Bass (1967a) experimented with groups of male managers in which the heads of the groups revealed their opinions at the beginning or end of a session, or not at all. The other group members were able to influence each other most when the heads remained silent, but they exhibited greater coalescence around the heads when the heads revealed their opinions. Silent heads were most influenced by the other members and were most dissatisfied with their own final judgments.
Early presentation by a leader of his or her favorite alternatives to decisions followers’ generation of additional alternatives (Maier & Sashkin, 1971). The search for alternatives is narrowed, and the quality of the decision may suffer (Brillhart & Jochem, 1964). When leaders were trained by Maier and McRay (1972) to delay presenting their preferences, their followers were more productive in proposing high-quality alternatives.
Style. Managers differ consistently in their style of communicating. Replicating earlier work, McCroskey and Young (1981) found that the communication style of senior managers and the immediate superiors of employees affected different aspects of their employees’ satisfaction. In an information technology firm, a navy civilian agency, and a social service agency, Klauss and Bass (1982) conducted path analyses for the relationships among managers’ communication styles, according to their supervisors, peers, and subordinates. Managers who were described as highly informative and trustworthy contributed considerably to their colleagues’ role clarity, satisfaction with the managers, and evaluations of the effectiveness of the managers. Trustworthiness and credibility depended on being a careful listener, on being informal, and on being open in two-way conversations. For the Hanover Insurance Companies (1988), trust was a key to being open, one of their most central values supporting the goals of profitability, of giving customers “good value for their money,” and of creating an environment that would help the individual and others to achieve their full potential. Informativeness in the Klauss and Bass path analysis depended on being seen as a careful transmitter of information and using frank, open, two-way communications. Similarly, St. John (1983) observed that the credibility of supervisors was enhanced by personal style, frankness, consistency, accessibility, keeping promises, accepting responsibility, and showing interest in others.
Luthans and Larsen (1986) directly observed the communication behavior of 120 managers from five organizational settings. They also gathered self-reports on how the managers communicated. Two dimensions emerged in analyses of the data. Consistent with the relationship between activity and leadership to be discussed in Chapter 6, the first dimension was the extent to which the manager actively communicated, rather than remaining a passive isolate who was drawn into communication activities only when these were necessary to manage conflicts. The second dimension involved the extent to which a manager was informal, spontaneous, and oriented toward development, rather than formal and communicative mainly when controlling others with regularly scheduled monitoring.
Competence with Linguistic Forms. It may not be what the leader says, but the way he or she says it. Drake and Moberg (1986) suggested that linguistic form may be more important than linguistic substance in affecting whether attempts to lead are accepted or rejected. Some forms can suppress the subordinates’ tendency to calculate the costs and benefits of an exchange. For example, subordinate may be sedated. He or she may comply without thinking about the cost when told, “We’ve just got a last-minute rush order that needs to be filled before we leave tonight.” The semantically direct “I want you to fill this rush order” might result in the employees’ thinking about the cost of compliance and desiring an inducement for complying. Numerous other hints, prompts, teasing, and semantic indirectness can serve to sedate the subordinate. The leader can avoid responsibility for providing inducements for compliance: “You may find it worthwhile to fix the oil gauge.” The leader’s language can also be palliative. For example, a staff manager, with no way of rewarding line employees for information he requires, may get the information by hedging: “This won’t take long, but would you locate some good estimates of the prices?”
Quality of Writing. The advent of electronic mail, through which every employee is in instant contact with every other employee’s personal computer terminal, suggests that the quality of writing, although truncated, will regain the status for distance communication that it had before the invention of the telephone. The storage and retrieval of transmitted information will also be greatly improved. Nonetheless, oral communication is likely to remain highly important to leading.
Competence in Nonverbal Communication. Non-verbal communication is also important to leadership (Stein, 1975). In investigating the effects of nonverbal and verbal communications among 151 college students on their perceptions of leadership, Gitter, Black, and Fishman (1975) concluded that nonverbal communications could be even more important than verbal communication.
For example, Remland (1984) demonstrated that superiors in videotaped interactions with subordinates would be seen as more considerate (and therefore more satisfying as leaders) if they used nonverbal means to reduce the status differences between themselves and their subordinates. Elsewhere, Remland (1981) pointed out that when nonverbal messages contradicted verbal ones, the listener tended to trust the nonverbal messages more. Thus a manager who talked as if he wanted to share decision making with a subordinate, but looked bored whenever the subordinate spoke, would be regarded as manipulative and insincere. Baird (1977) examined eight categories of nonverbal behavior in 10 discussion groups of five students each. These categories were: (1) head-nodding agreement; (2) head-shaking disagreement; (3) eye contact; (4) facial agreement; (5) facial disagreement; (6) postural shift; (7) gesticulation with the shoulders or arms; and (8) gesticulation with the hands or fingers. A significant relationship was found, in particular, between emergence as a leader and the tendency to gesticulate with the shoulders or arms. Friedman and Riggio (1981) examined the extent to which individuals differed in their nonverbal expressiveness and indicated that those who were more nonverbally expressive were more likely to influence the mood of those who were less nonverbally expressive. Such nonverbal expressiveness was also found to contribute to patients’ satisfaction with the interpersonal manners of their physicians (Freedman, DiMatteo, & Taranta, 1980).
Sense of Humor. Sense of humor is the ability to perceive, express, and enjoy what is amusing, laughable, or comical. There is more anecdotal evidence but less empirical research showing that leaders who use humor in communicating to their followers are more successful and effective than those who do not (Crawford, 1994). Some leaders have more of a sense of humor than others and make more use of it in their communications. Humorous communicating evokes a response by contrasting incongruent ideas, by engendering a feeling of superiority over others, by releasing tension, or by dealing with ambiguity in the environment (Hudson, 1979). Laughter is provoked by the unexpected punch line. Clowning wits are rated low in influence but high in popularity. Sarcastic wits are rated higher in influence but lower in popularity (Gruner, 1965). Humor increases the favorableness of an audience toward the speaker, and makes a speech more interesting, persuasive, and memorable. Self-disparagement may be effective if it is witty, indirect, and based on clever wordplay rather than exaggerated personal defects. Put-downs of others need to be avoided if they offend the values of the listeners. (Munn & Gruner, 1981).
Humor and Effective Leadership. Southwest Airlines looks for a sense of humor in job applicants (Quick, 1993). Individuals with a greater sense of humor reveal traits associated with successful and effective leadership such as self-esteem, emotional stability, extroversion, and sociability (Kuiper & Martin, 1993). Use of humor by the leaders of work groups helps improve morale (Gruner, 1977), cohesiveness (Duncan, 1982), motivation, (Crawford, 1994), creativity and divergent thinking (Czikszentmihalyi, 1996), and productivity (Clouse & Spurgeon, 1995). Humor has alleviated intimidation and stress and encouraged communication (Vinton, 1989).
Kilinski-Depuis and Kottke (1999) correlated 80 subordinates’ ratings of their supervisors. They were all employees of an international marketing firm. Their ratings of the sense of humor of their supervisors correlated .48 with their ratings of the supervisors’ consideration. Sense of humor was measured by seven modified items drawn from the Situational Humor Response Questionnaire (Lefcourt & Martin, 1986), which assesses how much a person typically responds with mirth and laughter to a wide variety of life situations. Avolio, Howell, and Sosik (1999) tested, in a large financial insurance company, the impact of 115 leaders’ use of humor on the productivity of their 322 subordinates. What was measured was the frequency of occurrence by rated subordinates of instances in which the leader “uses humor to take the edge off during stressful periods,” “uses a funny story to turn an argument in his or her favor,” “makes us laugh at ourselves when we are too serious,” “uses amusing stories to defuse conflicts,” and “uses wit to make friends of the opposition.” Leadership was measured by the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (Bass & Avolio, 1997). The effectiveness of the leader was assessed by consolidated unit performance, the extent to which the leader’s organizational unit achieved annual goals. Performance appraisals of the leaders also were available. Transformational leadership correlated .56 with a five-item “use of humor” scale. Contingent reward correlated .45 and laissez-faire leadership correlated 2.50 with the use of humor. A partial least-squares analysis (PLS) showed that transformational leadership combined with the use of humor correlated highly with the leaders’ appraised performance and the consolidated performance of the leaders’ unit. But combining humor with contingent reward appeared ineffective.
Consideration. Consideration can be seen in prosocial behavior, such as helping, sharing, donating, cooperating, and volunteering. Such behavior aims to produce and maintain the well-being and integrity of others. Leaders will manifest it by showing leniency in personnel decisions, practicing a considerate style, sacrificing their own interests, and spending time and energy for the good of the group or organization or the individuals within it (Brief & Motowidlo, 1986). The leader who displays prosocial behavior serves as a role model for a good organizational citizen, who complies with the organization’s requirements despite personal inconvenience, suggests improvements without personal benefit, and ignores hardships to carry on voluntarily (Smith, Organ, & Near, 1983). Thus probation officers will have little effect on recidivism if they show empathic, warm regard for parolees but fail to demonstrate prosocial values and socially acceptable ways of achieving goals and do not model, encourage, and reinforce noncriminal alternatives (Ross & Gendreau, 1980). A sample of 97 first-line supervisors reported spending an average of 2.5 hours a week discussing personal problems with their subordinates, such as difficulties with coworkers; opportunities for advancement; dissatisfaction with their jobs; and financial, physical, family, and emotional problems. Some supervisors also mentioned problems with sex, alcohol, and drugs. The most common strategies of the supervisors were to offer support, to listen, and to ask questions. In these discussions, the subordinates and supervisors generated solutions and shared personal experiences (Kaplan & Cowen, 1981). From structural and factor analyses of the descriptions of helping behavior by 58 first-line supervisors and their 355 subordinates, Konovsky (1986) found one factor in the helping behavior of supervisors that involved offering support and sympathy and a second factor that involved assistance in solving problems. Although better-educated superiors were directly helpful, the supervisors’ task competence and experience did not make any difference. Overall, the satisfaction of followers was enhanced when their leaders showed that they cared by demonstrating their consideration for the members of their group. Such consideration emerged early in factorial studies of the behavior of leaders (Fleishman, 1951) and has appeared repeatedly in subsequent analyses.
Individuation. Within the immediate group, the interpersonally competent leader can individualize his or her relationships, avoid treating all subordinates alike (Meyer 1980), and discriminate between the more competent and less competent members in the group (Fiedler, 1964). Diffusion of responsibility in group decisions is avoided unless the group decisions serve useful purposes, such as gaining commitment from peripherally involved members. Equity is favored rather than equal-ity—each member may be given equal opportunities, but rewards will be contingent on each individual’s contribution to the group’s success. Group productivity is enhanced by such individuation (Ziller, 1964). Interpersonally competent leaders are oriented toward the individual development of their subordinates, as well as the development of their team. Morse and Wagner (1978) found that effective managerial behavior provided for the growth and development of both. Assignments are delegated to subordinates to provide such opportunities for development. Competent leaders take on responsibilities as mentors and coaches according to the differential needs of subordinates for guidance and counseling.
Bradford and Cohen (1984) say that the quintessence of “postheroic” transformational managers is their orientation toward developing their subordinates. These managers build teams that share responsibility and visions of the future, as well as support the continuous development of individual skills. In so doing, they enhance the motivation, commitment, and performance of their subordinates. Individualized consideration was one of the transformational leadership factors which emerged from descriptions of leaders by their colleagues and subordinates using the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (Bass & Avolio, 1989). Individualized consideration involved showing concern for each subordinate as an individual and attending to the subordinate’s development. This factor consistently correlated highly with subjective and objective measures of the leader’s effectiveness (Bass, 1985a; Hater & Bass, 1988; Yammarino & Bass, 1989).
Social Insight, Empathy, and Leadership. Leadership of a group depends, to some extent, on the leader’s ability and motivation to estimate accurately the group’s attitudes, motives, and current level of effectiveness. As Bass (1960, pp. 167–168) indicated, “It is not enough for a leader to know how to get what followers want, or to tell them how to get what they want. The leader must be able to know what followers want, when they want it, and what prevents them from getting what they want. Empathic success should increase with increased motivation to attend to clues. It should also increase with information available about others’ behavior. Two persons may display the same success in guessing the motives of some other members. One estimator may be more apt; the other estimator may be more interested in the question because of momentary situational demands or acquired motives. An alert teacher ‘senses’ from facial expressions, questions or lack of them, restlessness, and lack of response whether [he or] she is continuing to meet the needs of the student audience. An effective orator or actor requires similar skills.”
Many others have offered similar propositions. Wittenberg (1951) emphasized the need-estimating aspect of leadership. That is, the leader of a group must know what the individual members need and then apply the group process so that the members will satisfy these needs. Coyle (1948) suggested that to work with young people, group leaders must understand the various motives that draw the group together, to “find the appropriate form to clothe their collective needs.”
For political and organizational leadership, Titus (1950) and J. M. Bums (1978) noted that the leader must be able to choose the group’s objectives wisely and forecast the cost of obtaining the objectives, the likelihood of doing so, and the degree to which goal attainment will be satisfying to the members. Lane (1985) suggested that organizational managers should examine their ability to be followers so that they can better understand the feelings and problems of their subordinates. Managers can do this by examining their own role as followers with different bosses.
Leaders should appreciate whether their subordinates learn from them and whether their subordinates are comfortable sharing problems and confidences with them. They also need to know their subordinates’ strengths and weaknesses. In the same vein, Haislip (1986) saw that a leader needs to be sensitive to those aspects of the work experience that illustrate how the organization values its employees’ personal goals. Such sensitivity will keep the leader focused on helping to maintain the congruence of the goals of the employees and the organization and, thereby, the employees’ commitment. Fielder, Warrington, and Blaisdell (1952) noted the importance of unconscious attitudes in sociometric choice. Deep probes are needed to test whether leaders are better able than nonleaders to diagnose social situations. Empathy is often emotional, intuitive, and unconscious. Projective techniques must be used to study it.
It is expected that leaders will be more insightful. Thus Shartle, Stogdill, and Campbell (1949) found that nominations for “popular leader” were correlated .47 with predictions of “who will be most accurate in estimating group opinion.” In a study of 153 supervisors in seven organizations, E. J. Frank (1973) observed that leaders who perceived their roles as requiring sensitivity to others also perceived themselves as being sensitive. Along with this felt sensitivity, the leaders appeared to feel that they were openly accepted by the group and that the working environment was pleasant. Alertness to changing circumstances and shifts in needs was also considered important to leadership (Hollander, 1978).
In all, from the early studies on, it has been thought that insight and empathy give an individual the competence to gain, hold, and maintain the position of leader. In traditional Japan, the head of a group ostensibly made the group’s decisions; and once the leader made a decision, it was regarded as the “will of the group” and accepted without challenge. But if one looked more carefully, one saw that the leader had the responsibility of sensing the will of the group in order to understand what was wanted, both intellectually and emotionally. He had to hara de wakaru or “understand with his belly” (Ker-linger, 1951). It appears that this is still required of the Japanese manager.
Insight, empathy, and accuracy about the other person appear to be particularly important in international negotiations. The ability to diagnose and understand the motives of others and to predict their subsequent actions accurately separates great statesmen from mediocre politicians. Because of the sentiment against war in Britain and France in 1938, the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and the French premier Édouard Daladier wanted to believe that Adolf Hitler could be conciliated, regarding the local conflict over the Sudetenland, with goodwill and flexibility. In Winston Churchill’s diagnosis, Hilter was using the local situation to destroy Czechoslovakia as a key bastion that was standing in the way of Hitler’s plans to conquer Europe. At Munich, Chamberlain and Daladier completely misread Hitler’s goals, values, and intentions; Churchill understood them accurately (Tucker, 1981). But the leadership and compliance displayed by all parties at Munich were strongly associated with the orientations of all the key figures to personal predilections, power, and politics.
Insight, Empathy, and Transactional and Transformational Leadership. Insight and empathic competence should be important if the leader is transactional and engages in an exchange relationship with followers. The leader needs to learn what the followers want so that he or she can make the right offers to them for their compliance. But the transformational leader also can build from a stronger base if he or she understands the current needs and concerns of prospective followers. The individually considerate transformational leader must have a sense of the followers’ developmental needs and of how the followers’ current wishes differ from one another. The inspirational leader has a sense of which appeals will be heard most readily by followers.
Problems with Insight and Empathy. Although insight and empathy have been regarded as important, empirical evidence of the association of these personal traits with leadership is often hard to establish. The data suggest that in comparison with others, leaders do not appear to exhibit a higher degree of generalized insight into the feelings or motivation of followers. Furthermore, various measurement problems complicate the conclusions, and many contingencies force the qualification of results. However, considerable positive evidence has been amassed about the insight of leaders into the feelings of their immediate followers and an understanding of the localized situation.
In the most general sense, “empathy” refers to awareness or appreciation, and “insight” refers to an understanding of what others are thinking and feeling about a matter. Empathy is “the ability to walk around in someone else’s world” (Kilcourse, 1985, p. 23). President Bill Clinton impressed troubled supporters by saying, “I share your pain.” Insight and empathy may be a matter of seeing others in relation to ourselves. But the linkages of empathic ability and social insight to leadership are complicated by the various definitions and ways of measuring empathy and insight.
Generalized Social Insight and Empathy. Empathy and insight can refer either to awareness and understanding of social phenomena at a general level (knowledge of cultural norms and social intelligence) or to understanding the most probable tendencies of prototypical others. History is replete with examples of political leaders whose success depended on their accurate sensing of the moods and desires of their constituencies. Many leaders depend on almost daily public opinion polling and focus groups. Others appear to attend to newspaper columnists, editorials, television anchors, and hosts of talk shows.
Various researchers have developed measures of social insight and empathy at this general level. These measures require participants to estimate the percentage of people in a designated population who will endorse the items on a test of personality, attitudes, or job satisfaction. The participants’ accuracy is measured by how well their estimates match the actual endorsement by a sample of the population. Chowdhry and Newcomb (1952), Bell and Hall (1954), Nagle (1954), Trapp (1955), and Fleishman and Salter (1963) found that leaders were more accurate than nonleaders in estimating such responses in a general population. Kerr and Speroff (1951) and Van Zelst (1952) were able to forecast success as a salesman, union leader, and foreman with a brief test that purported to measure individual differences in empathic ability at the general level by the method just described. However, Sprunger (1949); Hites and Campbell (1950); Gage and Exline (1953); Talland (1954); Bugental and Lehner (1958); and Cohn, Fisher, and Brown (1961) did not find leaders to be significantly more accurate than nonleaders in such tested estimations. Along the same lines, Marchetti (1953) found no relation between grocery managers’ ability to predict employees’ responses on a test of attitudes in general and the managers’ efficiency as rated by their superiors. Shartle, Stogdill, and Campbell (1949) reported a slight negative relation between naval officers’ popularity as leaders and their tested ability to estimate group opinion in general. Thus decidedly mixed results have been found for the relationship between generalized social insight, generalized empathy, and leadership.
It is even questionable whether generalized empathy exists. Although Cline and Richards (1960, 1961) found low but significant correlations between a variety of different measures of ability to judge the behavior of other persons, Ausubel and Schiff (1955), Bender and Hastorf (1950), and Crow and Hammond (1957) found no support for the hypothesis that there is an ability to predict interpersonal responses in general. For one thing, education, experience, and general intelligence are likely to affect respondents’ performance on measures of generalized empathy and insight.
Localized Social Insight and Empathy. Different from generalized insight and empathy are specific perceptual sensitivities at a local level—in a designated group working with specific other members. A considerable array of positive findings supports Stogdill’s (1948) conclusion in Chapter 4 that “alertness to the surrounding environment and understanding of ‘social’ situations are intimately associated with leadership ability.” The ability to size up situations differentiated leaders from followers in six pre-1948 studies. Carter, Haythorn, Shriver, and Lanzetta (1951) also found that leaders were able to evaluate situations. Insight into motives, thoughts, feelings, and actions of others was found to characterize leaders in seven pre-1948 studies. Reviews of the literature on localized social insight and empathy generally affirmed the connection between empathy and leadership, although they found that the effects were small and may have been nonexistent or negative in many cases. Thus, for example, after surveying 15 studies that reported 101 results concerning leadership and empathy, R. D. Mann (1959) noted that 74% of the results were positive, but researchers usually were unable to obtain statistically significant positive results in any single investigation.
To illustrate, Williams and Leavitt (1947a, 1947b); G. H. Green (1948); Greer, Galanter, and Nordlie (1954); and Lansing (1957) used sociometric nominations as a basis for studying insight. Group members were asked to nominate other members for leadership and to estimate the ranking that others would ascribe to them. Leaders were found to be more accurate than nonleaders in estimating their own sociometric rank (their esteem or value to the group in the eyes of the other mem-bers) or, in some studies, the rank of others. Gallo and McClintock (1962) also found that leaders were more accurate than nonleaders in perceiving their esteem in the group. Furthermore, Fiedler’s (1967a) theory of leadership was first formulated around the linkage of empathy to leadership, and one’s assumed similarity to others was the main measure of consequence. In studies of basketball teams and surveying teams, Fiedler (1953a, 1953b, 1954a) found that the teams were more effective if their esteemed members, who were likely to be the team leaders, perceived preferred members to differ from rejected members. Fiedler (1954b, 1955, 1959) obtained similar findings for B-29 bomber crews, tank crews, and groups in open-hearth steel shops. The groups were more effective if the crew leaders or supervisors discriminated more distinctly between members with whom they preferred to work and members whom they rejected.
Nagle (1954) reported high correlations between departmental productivity and the ability of departmental supervisors to estimate employees’ attitudes. Anderhalter, Wilkins, and Rigby (1952) noted that candidates for the U.S. Marines Officers Candidate School who showed the highest ability to predict other candidates’ future effectiveness were likely to make effective company officers themselves. Greer, Galanter, and Nordlie (1954) found leaders of infantry squads to be more accurate than other squad members in their perceptions of the esteem of other members. J. Hogan and Holland (1998) obtained correlations between .45 and .73 with the Hogan Personality Inventory Empathy scale and five criteria of leadership for 25 managers from a large retail firm.
Schrage (1965) reported that accurate perception and interpretation of the environment were more important than the motivation for power or the need for achievement in differentiating successful from unsuccessful entrepreneurs. Jennings (1952a) showed that supervisors who did not understand the behavior of their subordinates felt inadequate and insecure. As their frustration increased, they became less able to obtain cooperation and satisfactory performance from their subordinates. Studies of managers who fail to rise in their organizations find that these managers are unable to understand others’ points of view. They are insensitive to others, unable to build a team, and unable to get work done when the work depends on the efforts of others (J. Hogan & R. Hogan, 2002).
Negative Results. On the basis of a survey of managers and their subordinates, Hatch (1962) concluded that the empathic accuracy of the managers had limited practical significance. He found no significant differences between the empathic accuracy of the managers and the superiors’ description of the managers as good or poor in maintaining satisfactory relations with their subordinates. Similarly, Jerdee (1964) reported that supervisors’ predictions of subordinates’ morale were negatively related to the employees’ actual morale scores. Andrews and Farris (1967) noted that subordinates’ innovation was correlated negatively with their supervisors’ effectiveness in planning if the supervisors were sensitive to individual differences, but the correlation was positive if the supervisors were insensitive to differences among people. Williams and Leavitt (1947a) observed that the more successful leaders they studied most underestimated the sociometric status accorded them by other group members. Finally, Shartle, Stogdill, and Campbell (1949) found that nominations for popular leaders were not correlated with errors in estimating group opinion. Likewise, such errors failed to correlate with predictions of who would be most accurate. Although popular leaders were not more accurate than unpopular leaders in estimating group opinion, other group members expected them to be. More often than not, positive or negative results have to be qualified by conditions. Only under particular localized circumstances was one likely to find that a leader was more insightful or empathic than a nonleader. Some of these variations in outcomes, of course, may be due to random error when subjected to a meta-analysis. Nevertheless, successful political leaders can sense what their constituencies want and articulate their needs even without public opinion polls.
Substance of Judgments. Foa (1960) found that workers’ predictions of their supervisor’s responses to a projective (picture) test were more accurate when the supervisor described the action in the ambiguous picture as positive and focused on the job rather than on interpersonal relations. Holmes (1969) compared leaders’ estimates of the frequency of interaction and duration of speech of group members with recordings of the groups’ performance. Leaders evaluated the duration of behavior by followers more accurately than the frequency of the behavior.
Specific Relevance. Chowdhry and Newcomb (1952) found that leaders judged group opinion better than non-leaders or isolates, but the superiority of leaders over non-leaders was restricted mainly to issues that were relevant to their specific groups. When matters concerned groups in which they were not leaders, their superiority tended to disappear. Similarly, Northwood (1953) collected facts and opinions from a sample of residents in a housing project. Officeholders were found to be significantly more accurate than informal leaders and followers as judges of fact and opinion, but they were not superior judges of nonrelevant facts and opinion. Greer, Galanter, and Nordlie (1954) emphasized this type of contingent outcome. Hites and Campbell (1950) failed to obtain positive results, because they did not ask for estimations relevant to the members’ goals.
Cohesiveness. Since cohesive groups usually involve considerable mutuality of choice among their high-status members, the leadership clique was expected to exhibit higher accuracy about others in the group than the members of lower status. Exline (1960) assigned members to high-or low-congeniality groups to discuss a task and measured the members’ accuracy of knowledge of each other’s task-relevant and person-relevant opinions. Exline found that only in cohesive groups were the leaders more accurate judges of person-relevant opinions, such as popularity. Lemann and Solomon (1952) also found that the accuracy of interpersonal perception was higher in cohesive than uncohesive groups.
Familiarity. Studies of newly formed groups obtained negative results when they correlated a member’s first impressions of others with the member’s initial success as a leader (C. B. Bell, 1951; H. E. Hall, 1953). Hatch (1962) found that only if managers felt that they were well acquainted with a subordinate were they able to predict the subordinate’s attitudes beyond what would be predicted by chance.
The familiarity of members in a specific group related directly to the members’ accuracy in judging each other’s life goals. Filella (1971) asked 32 Indian college students in groups of eight members to individually rank their own life goals and then to rank the life goals of each of the other group members. The mean correlations between estimations by others and self-rankings systematically declined linearly with decreasing familiarity, from a correlation of .54 for the raters most familiar with the ratees to .12 for the raters least familiar with the ratees.
Lupfer (1965) recorded group members’ interactions in a business game. At the end of each session, each subject indicated, on a questionnaire, a prediction of and a prescription for the behavior of every other member. As the sessions progressed, the members’ role behavior tended to conform to prescriptive norms, and the prediction of behavior increased in accuracy. In a reversal of these findings, Browne and Shore (1956) noted that although second-level departmental managers were less close to operating employees than first-level supervisors were, the managers were somewhat more accurate than the supervisors in predicting the employees’ attitudes.
Focused Attention. Lundy (1956) administered a scale of values to 52 students who later met in pairs to discuss a problem. Then each partner predicted the responses of the other, using the value scale, both with attention focused on the self and with attention focused on the partner. Lundy found that focusing attention on the partner increased accuracy in predicting the partner’s responses.
Assumed and Actual Similarity. Localized social insight and empathy often present a multiple measurement problem. Bass, Burger, et al. (1979) used a model that was first formulated by Cronbach and Glaser (1953). The managers’ ability to judge the life goals of specific other managers with whom they had been working in small exercise groups for several days was examined. The procedure was as follows. Participants ranked each of 11 life goals in order of importance to them. Then they ranked the goals in order of importance to each of the other members of their exercise group. Three correlational indexes were calculated. It was assumed that partici-pants generally had an accurate appreciation of their own goals. The indexes were: (1) Empathy or accuracy in judging others—the correlation between a participant’s judgments about other members’ life goals and the other members’ self-judgments; (2) Projection or assumed similarity to others—the correlation between the ranking participants assigned to themselves and those they assigned to everyone else in the group; (3) Homogeneity of the group or actual similarity to others—the correlation of a participant’s self-ratings with the self-ratings of each of the other members. In addition to the scoring biases pointed out by D. T Campbell (1955), studies of empathy at the local level are also likely to suffer from the generalized tendency of raters to assume that they are similar to others. Thus, for 1,026 managers in 12 countries, Bass, Burger, et al. found that assumed similarity among the raters averaged .50. But true similarity or homogeneity, evidenced by the average correlation of self-rating among all participants, was only .21. Likewise, Lazar (1953), after a review of eight studies, concluded that in judging the attitudes of groups, people err in the direction of their own beliefs or opinions.
The amount of actual similarity or homogeneity also affected what kinds of outcomes were obtained by Bass, Burger, et al. This finding was consistent with Octet and Silva’s (1951) study, which found that the smaller the difference between actual self-descriptions and others’ self-descriptions, the smaller the error when pairs of persons predicted each other’s responses. Both rationally and empirically we are more accurate about others who happen to be like us because of the general tendency to assume that others are indeed like us. A leader’s accuracy may be accounted for by the bias toward assumed similarity and the homogeneity of the leader and the group. In fact, to be a leader of a group, one must usually share many attitudes, values, and goals with the other members (Cart-wright, 1951). By definition, the opinions of group members are more strongly influenced by the leaders of the group than by nonleaders. It follows that the forecasts of group opinion made by leaders will be more accurate than estimates made by nonleaders, since the opinions are close to those held by the leaders. Thus, when leadership was defined in terms of influence on a group decision, Talland (1954) demonstrated that leaders were better estimators of final group opinion because it was closer to their own initial opinion. But leaders are not more accurate in estimating opinion before interaction. These confoundings of measurements need to be kept in mind when one considers the correlations obtained between leadership and localized measures of empathy and insight.
Accuracy of Perceptions of Status and Importance of Organizational Position. E. L. Scott (1956) analyzed organizational charts drawn by 696 officers and men aboard 10 submarines in which the status structure was thought to be well defined. He found marked differences in the accuracy of status perceptions of the men on the various ships and among the men in various departments within the same ship. The most frequent type of error was to perceive superiors as peers, peers as subordinates, and persons outside one’s department as subordinates in one’s department. High-ranking personnel made fewer errors in their perception of superiors and peers, but not in total. The more widely superiors interacted with other persons, the greater was the perceptual error of their subordinates. The greater the disparity between an officer’s rank and the level of his position aboard ship, the greater were the perceptual errors of his subordinates. At the same time, the subordinates were able to perceive status relationships more accurately when their superiors retained authority and delegated less. Scott’s study pointed to some potent organizational factors that operate to determine the accuracy with which status is perceived in highly structured situations.
During the third quarter of the twentieth century, situational factors dominated the field. Individual traits and dispositions seemed unimportant. However, after correction, rotation experiments showed that traits were still important in accounting for leaders’ behavior. In the last quarter of the century, we had to rethink whether leadership traits and leadership were a consequence of nature or nurture. Rapid advances in genetics, heritability research, and molecular biology suggested that we had to give a lot more attention to nature. Traits of leader-ship returned to center stage in the study of leadership. Situational effects remained important, but mainly as contingencies. Competence was seen as a matter of task accomplishment and interpersonal relations. Both were fundamental to successful and effective leadership. Task accomplishment involved traits like intelligence and knowledge. Interpersonal competence involved the ability to communicate and to demonstrate, caring, insight, and empathy. Effective leaders needed to sense the needs of their followers and point out ways to fulfill them.
The follow-up of the traits of leadership from before 1970 to after 1970 and into the twenty-first century generally showed renewed continuity and expansion. Competencies to deal with tasks and cognitive abilities were seen in more detail. Task competence results in attempts to lead that are more likely to yield success for the leader and effectiveness for the group. But competence is relative; this suggests that a complete understanding of leader-group relations requires an examination not only of individual differences in competencies, such as intelligence and experience, but of the relevance of the competencies for given situations. Intuition plays an important role in effective management; and leadership, particularly at higher organizational levels, appears to be a consequence of the possession of relevant information based on experience. The true correlation of intelligence with leadership is about .50 across a wide range of situations. Generally, more intelligent people are likely to be more task-competent and emerge as leaders, regardless of the situation. Other personal characteristics also contribute to task competence and leadership in different situations. On the other hand, since task requirements may vary from one situation to another, situational differences will also affect who emerges as a leader. Finally, other contingencies that moderate the relationship between competence and leadership need to be considered. Task competence is not enough. Many bright, able, and technically proficient individuals fail as leaders because they lack interpersonal competence.
Many socioemotional traits affect leadership. They will be discussed more fully in the next several chapters. Traits of character—conscientiousness, discipline, moral reasoning, integrity, and honesty—will be included in dealing with the ethics of leadership. The negative impact on leadership of neuroticism, arrogance, anxiety, depression, and narcissism, rigidity will also be examined. The biophysical traits of physical fitness, stature, hardiness, and energy level will resurface again, along with self-confidence, self-esteem, self-monitoring, self-regulating, and self-efficacy. We will turn next to when and whether active leadership emerges.