Leadership and personality

Leadership and personality are intertwined and have an impact on organizational performance. There are numerous leadership styles such as transactional leadership, and behavioral leadership. All of these theories outline the characteristics that a successful leader must have in order to foster organizational growth. Transformational leadership is used more broadly than previous types. Emotional intelligence and individualized thoughtfulness, which are related to one’s personality, are two characteristics of a transformational leader. Leadership can predict both good and bad team performance, while personality can predict both good and bad team performance. Leaders must have specific talents and abilities in order to effectively lead a company through change. The Big Five Model of personality describes the five factors that promote effective leadership and positive relationships at the workplace. They include surgency, agreeableness, adjustment, conscientiousness, and openness to experience. Emotional intelligence is particularly vital as it incorporates efficient communication skills, empathy, and self-regulation. Such traits can promote solving complex problems and understand the needs of employees. Ultimately, leadership drives organizational effectiveness while the effectiveness of firms drives the well-being of their members. Most importantly, leadership is a function of personality. For example, the personality of the chief executive officer is the most significant profitability determinant.

Personality and Leadership

H1= There is a relationship between personality characteristics and leadership effectiveness in the workplace

Transformational leadership model may not be ideal for every work setting, but the model does have a broad appeal for a wide range of organizations. For instance, hiring transformational leadership experts can aid firms to establish a cost-effective strategy. Transformational leadership is a leadership style that focuses on effecting revolutionary change in firms through a commitment to the vision of the organization. The style redefines the missions and visions of people, renews their commitment and restructures the systems for the accomplishment of goals through a relationship of mutual stimulation. The major characteristics of transformational leadership include inspirational motivation, idealized influence, individualized consideration and intellectual stimulation. The state of idealized influence is created through leading by example, sharing risks with followers, acting confidently and optimistically and articulating a vision (Bolden et al., 2003). The transformational leader should also inspire the followers towards new goals and ideas through inspirational motivation. One may encourage followers to become part of the overall organizational culture and environment. On the other hand, intellectual stimulation can promote the self-reflective change of beliefs and values. The transformational leader can foster a climate favoring critical examination of held beliefs, notions and status quo. One can also create a conducive environment for creating and sharing knowledge. Ultimately, the aspect of individualized consideration ensures every individual is treated as a whole rather than as an employee (Alkahtani et al., 2011). A leader learns to listen to every follower’s needs, express praise as a motivation and makes public recognition of achievements and initiatives.

On the other hand, transactional leadership is based on self-motivated people working in a well- structured and directed environment (Bolden et al., 2003). Transactional leaders value order and structure and are likely to manage large firms that require rules and regulations to complete objectives on time. They have formal positions and authorities and the responsibility of managing and facilitating the group and individual performance. Other leadership theories include the behavioral theories that are classified as such because they focus on a leader’s behaviors. The theories have grown from the supposition of leaders being born as explained by the Great Man Theory to a possibility of being able to measure one’s leadership potential as elaborated by the trait theory. Research depicts that there exist two groups of behaviors that are correlated. They include the people-oriented behavioral leaders and the task oriented. The task-oriented leaders focus their behavior on the organizational structure the operating procedures while keeping control (Bolden et al., 2003). Additionally, they are concerned about staff motivation. On the other hand, the people-oriented leaders focus their behaviors on ensuring the satisfaction of inner needs of the people. They seek to motivate staff through emphasizing human relation. Moreover, they focus on the task and results while focusing on behaviors in line with observing, listening, encouraging, coaching and mentoring.

Literature Review

According to Chuang, the sustainable advantage of globalization in this competitive 21st-century landscape is dependent on the abilities and skills of a leader. The manager needs to manage diversity and implement the increasingly complex business strategies. One of the primary global business success is effective workforce diversity management. While pursuing leadership effectiveness in the current globalized world, cross-cultural leaders need to be able to efficiently manage diverse settings efficiently, an aspect known as cultural quotient or cultural intelligence (Chuang, 2013). Global leaders also need to understand the differing effects globalization has on countries and people. They need to also understand that organizations require specific leadership development approaches for organizational performance and effective leadership (Hogan, n.d.). To keep up with this pace, in the rapidly changing environment, leaders require more interpersonal skills to meet future and current challenges. Some of the critical leadership skills a global leader should possess include self-awareness, understand cultural stereotypes increase self-assurance, create a vision and be able to sell it and create appropriate motivational techniques (Barrick & Ryan, 2003). They need to be transformational leaders who can be able to establish trust, motivate staff ad foster team spirit. They can also create motivational techniques such as reward and recognition to stimulate the performance of employees and increase feelings of belonging and appreciation.

According to Hogan, leadership and personality are positively related. He describes leadership in terms of building and maintaining high-performance teams. The leadership can best be evaluated by the performance of these teams compared to their competitors. He reviews leadership from the perspective of group effectiveness and reveals six dependable conclusions. They include competency models, good to great themes, implicit leadership theory, personality predicts leadership predicts business and the corporate elite is no race (Hogan, n.d.). All the large firms have competency models with similar themes that include intrapersonal skills, interpersonal skills, business skills and leadership skills. The leaders in such firms can be evaluated based on their decisiveness, integrity, vision, and competence. Hogan stipulates that personality can be defined in five broad dimensions which include adjustment particularly poise and self-confidence, ambition or extraversion, agreeableness, prudence and openness (Alkahtani et al., 2011). These factors form the Five-Factor Model (FFM) of personality.

Hogan further elaborates on leadership literature using two broad traditions. The first major meta-analysis depicts that 4 of the five dimensions of the FFM predict the ratings of leadership to be independent of the occupation or organization. Adjustment proves to be the best predictor while agreeableness is the worst predictor. The second critical meta-analysis depicts that a manager’s personality influences employee engagement (Hogan, n.d.). Additionally, high engagement can predict positive business outcomes while low engagement may predict negative business outcomes. Most importantly, the link between the personality of a manager and business unit performance is mediated by staff engagement. Poor leadership from the top management can lead to losses and organization failure. Therefore, personality can predict both good or bad leadership. Consequently, leadership can predict both good or bad team performance (Barrick & Ryan, 2003). The author establishes the Hogan leadership value chain model. The model elaborates personality into values, behaviors, and decisions depicting how personality defines all these three paths.

Alkahtani et al., state that not all leaders can lead or bring about change. To bring this change, leaders need to be self-confident and move confidently towards the change. Leaders need to predict the forces that may cause change, react to the unforeseen events that make change urgent while identifying opportunities that need change (Bolden et al., 2003). The authors acknowledge the fact that leaders possess different personalities such that personality forms a great point of study when evaluating organizational behavior. The two basic determinants of personality include one’s heredity and past environmental interactions. Most importantly, they identify the five factors of Big Five Model of personality as surgency, agreeableness, adjustment, conscientiousness and openness to experience (Alkahtani et al., 2011). The factors show how personality relates to behavior and transformational leadership. Agreeableness, openness to experience and extroversion particularly predicted positive transformational leadership. Furthermore, emotional intelligence was found to relate to leadership effectiveness (Saputra, 2014). The emotional intelligence components include empathy, self-regulation, communication skills which help leaders solve complex problems, adapt their behaviors to the situations and understand the needs of others.

Findings

The personality of leaders is the most vital determinant of organization profitability other than the firm’s industrial sector. The well-run companies are substantially more profitable compared to poorly-run firms. Notably, the increasing technological innovation, globalization and demographic changes have led to firms seeking effective leadership for diverse workforce management (Chuang, 2013). Leadership extends to the global environment where the global leader is required to have cultural awareness, interpersonal skills, have a global mindset, and effective manager-employee relationships. The basic premise is that leaders need to constantly update their leadership skills, knowledge and abilities for effective cross-cultural management and leadership performance (Saputra, 2014).

Different people focus on the leader’s behavior differently. For instance, psychologists tend to focus on behavior in terms of structure and consideration and the leadership effect on staff morale. On the other hand, business schools tend to focus on decisions particularly staffing and strategy and the effect on judgment. However, very few individuals focus on the values as well as rewards, sanctions and cultural aspect despite all the three paths leading to overall engagement and improving business unit performance (Hogan, n.d.). Focusing on a leader’s personality will highlight the essence of incorporating all the three paths- values, decisions, and behavior to promote effective leadership and positive organizational performance.

Conclusion

Conclusively, the big five personality traits and leadership effectiveness are related. The overall team performance is affected by the personality of a leader. Leaders, therefore, have a unique task of persuading individuals and groups to set aside individual concerns and work towards a common goal. To continue persuading and influencing these followers, leaders need to understand how followers perceive them. Additionally, by recognizing the role played by the big five personality traits which include dependability, emotional stability, agreeableness, intellectance and surgency, leaders can learn to create a huge impact on the work environment (Saputra, 2014). Notably, organizations need to assess their managers and their qualities to ensure they possess an excellent personality that can fit in their innovative work environment and influence the workforce and organizational growth (Alkahtani et al., 2011). Poor leadership can lead to the failure of a company and loss of productive staff. Therefore, there needs to be an alignment in parallelism in leadership, personality and team performance to ensure the overall success of an organization.

References

Alkahtani, A., Abu-Jarad, I., Sulaiman, M., Nikbin, D. (2011). The Impact of Personality and Leadership Styles on Leading Change Capability on Malaysian Managers. Australian Journal of Business and Management Research, 1(2).

Barrick, M.R. & Ryan, A. M. (2003). Personality and Work. Reconsidering the Role of Personality in Organizations. Jossey-Bass.

Bolden, R., Gosling, J., Marturano, A. & Dennison, P. (2003). A Review of Leadership Theory and Competency Frameworks. University of Exeter.

Chuang, S. (2013). Essential Skills for Leadership Effectiveness in Diverse Workplace Development. Journal for Workforce Education and Development, 6(1).

Hogan, R. (n.d.). Personality, Leadership, and Organizational Effectiveness.

Saputra, A. J. (2014). The Influence of Leadership Style and Personality Towards Organizational Commitment at Pt. Pupuk Sriwidjaja Palembang in Indonesia.