Personality
American Psychological Association defines personality as an individual differences in patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving. Individual’s personality type is related to his/her personality style and affects how someone responds to the leadership style.
Personality Traits
People differentiate from each other in many aspects with personality being one of those aspects. Personality assessment is important to understand how it relates to someone’s preference of various leadership styles.
The personality types we measure are openness to new experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism (OCEAN), which are commonly called The Big Five. This model is considered universal and is one of the most commonly used models of personality testing in academic psychology.
· Openness to new experience refers to the extent to which people are imaginative, creative, curious, unconventional, autonomous, nonconforming, and aesthetically perceptive.
· Conscientiousness describes how careful, dependable, and self-disciplined someone.
· Extroversion is the trait of being sociable, outgoing, talkative, and assertive.
· Agreeableness reflects being trusting, helpful, considerate, tolerant, generous, and flexible.
· Neuroticism is the trait of being anxious, insecure, self-conscious, depressed, and temperamental (Daft, 2013).
As Digman and Inouye (1986) put it, “if a large number of rating scales is used and if the scope of the scales is very broad, the domain of personality descriptors is almost completely accounted for by five robust factors”.
Leadership
Over the last few decades, two predominant leadership styles have emerged. First, the exemplary leader, as defined by Bass (1985), inspires subordinates to transform and coordinate, rather than merely pursue their goals. A transformational leadership creates a vision and inspires followers to strive beyond required expectations, whereas, second dominant type, transactional leadership, focuses more on extrinsic motivation for the performance of job tasks.
Both styles are effective in achieving intended results. However, a wealth of research has substantiated the benefits of transformational leaders, such as Jeff Bezos, John D Rockefeller, Bill Gates, Marissa Mayer, Henry Ford, Steve Jobs and others. Relative to transactional leadership, transformational leadership has been demonstrated to enhance the performance of organisations (Barling et al., 1996), quality audits (Sosik & Dionne, 1997), sales performance (McColl-Kennedy & Anderson, 2002), and many other measures (Flood et al., 2000). This type of leader is action-oriented. Instead of philosophizing about how to change the world, they outline and execute a strategy that makes their vision a reality. Moreover, transformational leadership also fosters creativity in followers and innovation in teams.
Understanding the relationship between Personality and preferred Leadership
There are many reports that show the dependency between the personality trait and the leadership preferences. Personality is not performance, skills or knowledge. The preference for how people behave is based on their feelings and sensitivities. The character and style are personal reactions and habits. Personality does not completely determine someone’s behaviour; it is a tendency or base-point from which one tends to operate.
OCEAN and Preferences
Based on the results of several studies, the existence of the connection of the personality dimensions from the Big Five Model and managers’ leadership styles has been confirmed (Easley, 2019).
Several findings showed that people with Extraversion personality trait (hence people who are more sociable, energetic, adventurous, and assertive), seek exciting and stimulating events. To illustrate this, in one study, male extraverts were more likely than other individuals to assume a leadership role during team activities, but only when their performance was monitored by an attractive female (Campbell et al., 2003). Because of such drives, extraverts should be more likely than introverts to prefer transformational leaders. Another study has shown that Extroversion is highly related with leading change.
Additionally, challenging goals that transformational leaders promote boost the potential for employees to receive generous rewards, which disproportionately motivate extraverted individuals (Lucas et al, 2000).
In contrast, Transactional leadership will not necessarily influence the prevalence of social interactions or the prospect of sizeable rewards. Therefore, attitudes towards this leadership style might not vary with extraversion.
Moss, Ngu (2006) proposed five hypotheses, which were developed during the conducted research.
1. Extraversion is positively associated with preference towards transformational leadership.
2. Conscientiousness is positively associated with preference towards transformational leadership.
3. Openness to experience is positively associated with preference towards transformational leadership but negatively associated with preference towards transactional leadership.
4. Agreeableness is inversely associated with preference towards transactional leadership.
5. Neuroticism is positively associated with preference towards laissez-faire leadership, which is based on trust and reliance on employees.
Conclusion
Personality affects how people work in the most efficient manner, how they react to different situations, or communicate, and more. Because personality dictates people’s behaviours, true leaders must understand the personality types of their team members in order to ensure the most workplace success. Knowing which leadership style is most beneficial to a person with particular personality traits can produce optimal results in the organisation.
References
Barling, J., Weber, T., & Kelloway, E. K. (1996),Effects of transformational leadership training on attitudinal and financial outcomes: A field experiment. Journal of Applied Psychology, 81, 827-832
Bass, B. M. (1985), Leadership and performance beyond expectations, New York: Free Press
Campbell, L., Simpson,J. A., Stewart, M., &Manning, J. (2003),Putting personality in social context: Extraversion, emergent leadership, and the availability of rewards, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29, 1547-1559
Daft, R. L. (2013), Management (11th ed.), Marson, OH: Cengage Learning
Digman, J. M., & Inouye, J., (1986), Further specification of the five robust factors of personality, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 116–123
Easley, S. (2019), The Relationship Between Leadership Style and Personality Type Among
College Students, Honors Theses, 58
Flood, P. C., Hannan, E., Smith, K. G., Turner, T., West, M. A., & Dawson, J. (2000), Chief executive leadership style, consensus decisionmaking, and top management team effectiveness, European Journal of Work & Organizational Psychology, 9, 401-420
Lucas, R. E., Diener,E., Grob, A., Suh, E. M., &Shao, L, (2000),Cross-cultural evidence for the fundamental features of Extraversion, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 452- 468
McColl-Kennedy, J. R., & Anderson, R. D. (2002), Impact of leadership style and emotions on subordinate performance, The Leadership Quarterly, 13, 545-559
Moss, S. A., & Ngu, S. (2006), The relationship between personality and leadership preferences, Current Research in Social Psychology, 11, Article 6
Simic, J. & Ristic, M.R. (2017), The Relationship Between Personality Traits and Managers` Leadership Styles, European Journal of Social Sciences Education and Research, Vol.11 Nr. 2
Sosik, J. J., & Dionne, S. D., (1997), Leadership styles and Deming's behavior factors, Journal of Business & Psychology, 11, 447-462
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