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THE LEADER AS AN INDIVIDUAL. Damon Burton University of Idaho. PERSONALITY AND LEADERSHIP. Personality – set of unseen characteristics and processes that underlie a relatively stable pattern of behavior in response to ideas, objects or people in the environment.
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THE LEADER AS AN INDIVIDUAL Damon Burton University of Idaho
PERSONALITY AND LEADERSHIP • Personality – set of unseen characteristics and processes that underlie a relatively stable pattern of behavior in response to ideas, objects or people in the environment. • Understanding differences in personality can enhance leadership.
BIG 5 PERSONALITY DIMENSIONS • extraversion, • agreeableness, • conscientiousness, • emotional stability, and • openness to experience.
EXTRAVERSION Extraversion refers to traits that influence behavior in group settings. Extraversion – the degree to which a person is outgoing, sociable, talkative and comfortable meeting and talking to new people. Dominanceis also a characteristic of this personality trait because they like to be in control and have influence over others.
EXTRAVERSION Extraverts are confident, seek out positions of authority and are competitive and assertive. They like being in charge of others and have responsibility for others. Not all leaders need to be extraverts and dominant but it’s often helpful.
AGREEABLENESS Agreeableness – the degree to which a person is able to get along with others by being good-natured, cooperative, forgiving, compassionate, understanding and trusting. Agreeable leaders are warm and approachable rather than cold, distant and insensitive. They make friends easily and have a lot of friends.
AGREEABLENESS In today’s collaborative organizations, agreeableness is valuable. Agreeableness can be developed by being friendly and cooperative, understanding other people in a genuine way, and striving to make people feel good about themselves. They make friends easily and have a lot of friends.
CONSCIENTIOUSNESS Conscientiousness – the degree to which a person is responsible, dependable, persistent, and achievement-oriented. Conscientious leaders focus on a few goals that are pursued in a purposeful way. This trait focuses on the task not relationships.
EMOTIONAL STABILITY Emotional stability – is the degree to which a person is well-adjusted, calm and secure. Leaders who are emotionally stable handle stress and criticism well and don’t take mistakes or failures personally. They normally are high in emotional intelligence.
OPENNESS TO EXPERIENCE Openness to experience – is the degree to which a person has a broad range of interests and is imaginative, creative and willing to embrace new ideas. Open leaders are intellectually curious and seek new experiences thru travel, movies, books, the arts and movement. New experience truly broaden the mind and enhance receptivity.
PROBLEMS WITH THE BIG 5 Each dimension is made up of numerous traits which makes it hard to measure. Limited research have linked the Big 5 with leadership success. For example, a review could not conclude that 4 of the 5 dimensions related to successful leadership. A study of U.S. presidents found openness to experience was most highly related to greatness (e.g., Lincoln & Jefferson).
PROBLEMS WITH THE BIG 5 -2 Extraversion, conscientiousness and emotional stability also were correlated with greatness. Few leaders have consistently high scores across all Big 5 dimensions. Leaders must understand their personality traits and emphasize the positive and mitigate the negative. Intelligence, knowledge, values and problem-solving skills are also important.
LOCUS OF CONTROL • Locus of control – reflects whether people place primary responsibility for things within themselves or on outside forces. • Internal control – is the belief that their own actions determine what happens to them. • External control – is the belief that outside forces determine one’s fate.
LOCUS OF CONTROL - 2 • Internals versus externals behavior differently across a wide range of settings. • Internals are self-motivated, in control of their behavior, active in social and political causes, and actively seek information. • Internals are also better at handling complex information and problem-solving and are more achievement oriented.
LOCUS OF CONTROL - 3 • Internals are more interested in influencing others, so they are more likely to assume leadership roles. • Externals prefer structured, directed work situations. • Externals are better at handling work that requires compliance and conformity, but are worse at initiative, creativity and independent action. • Externals are better followers than leaders.
AUTHORITARIANISM • Authoritarianism – is the belief that power and status differences should exist in organizations. • Authoritarians adhere to conventional rules and values, obey established authority, respect power and toughness, judge others critically and disapprove of displaying one’s feelings. • Highly authoritarian leaders rely heavily on formal authority and are unlikely to share power with subordinates.
AUTHORITARIANISM - 2 • The new leadership paradigm is less authoritarian. • How followers respond to authoritarian leaders depends on how authoritarian they are themselves. • Dogmatism refers to how receptive people are to others’ ideas and opinions and is closely related to authoritarianism. • Dogmatic leaders are close-minded and unreceptive to other ideas and make decisions with limited information.
VALUES • Values – are fundamental beliefs that an individual considers to be important, are stable over time and impact attitudes, perceptions and behavior. • Values prompt people to prefer things be done in a particular way. • Strong values drive behavior. • Two types of values are (a)instrumentaland (b)end values.
What type of values were we measuring with the Life Values Inventory (LVI)?
VALUES - 2 • End Values – beliefs about the kind of goals that are worth pursuing (e.g., security, health, & social recognition). • Instrumental Values – beliefs about the types of behavior that are appropriate for reaching goals (e.g., helping others, honesty & courage). • Values are learned, not inherited, often early in life. • Teachers and coaches have a huge impact on values.
ATTITUDES • Attitude – a positive or negative evaluation of people, events and things. • Three components of Attitudes include: (a) cognitions (i.e., thoughts), (b) affect (i.e., feelings), and (c) behavior. • Cognitive component focuses on ideas and knowledge you have about a topic. • Affect component concerns how we feel about things. • Attitudes change more easily than values.
ATTITUDES - 2 • Self-Concept – is the collection of attitudes we have about ourselvesand includes self-esteem (i.e., general feelings about oneself). • Leaders with positive self-concepts are more effective in all situations. • How leaders relate to others depends on their attitude towards others. • Theory X and Theory Y represent 2 different sets of attitudes about how to interact and influence followers.
BAD ATTITUDES • According to Marshall Goldsmith, leaders sabotage their effectiveness with 3 bad attitudes, including: • winning at all costs in all situations, • clinging to the past, and • never being able to say you’re sorry.
SOCIAL PERCEPTION • Perception – the process people use to make sense out of their surroundings and experiences by selecting, organizing and interpreting information. • People often see the same event differently. • In a survey of 2000 workers, 92% of managers rated their performance good to excellent whereas only 67% of workers gave them similar ratings. • 40% of women but only 10% of men perceive that women face a “glass ceiling.”
PERCEPTUAL DISTORTIONS • Perception Distortions – are errors in perceptual judgment that arise from inaccuracies in the perceptual process. • Stereotyping, halo effect, projection and perceptual defense are common perceptual errors. • Stereotyping – the tendency to assign an individual to a group or category (e.g., female, black, elderly, or disabled) and then to attribute widely held generalizations about the group to that individual.
PERCEPTUAL DISTORTIONS - 2 • “Halo Effect” – occurs when the a person develops an overall impression of the person or situation based on one characteristic. • A “halo” characteristic blinds the person to other factor that should be part of a more complete assessment (i.e., punctuality). • Projection – the tendency to see your own personal traits in others so you project your own needs, feelings, values and attitudes into the judgment of others. • If you are highly motivated, you assume followers are as well.
PERCEPTUAL DISTORTIONS - 3 • Perceptual Defense – tendency to protect themselves against ideas, objects or people that are threatening by disregarding negative experiences. • We develop perceptual “blind spots” so negative information doesn’t hurt them. • For example, growing up in a home where parents argue all the time might prompt a person to try to avoid conflict at all costs.
WHAT IS AN ATTRIBUTION? • Attributions – are reasons given to explain successes and failures. • Weiner (1985)suggests that we each act as naïve psychologists trying to understand the reasons for why a particular outcome occurs. • For example, a girl may try to figure out why she lost a tennis match or did poorly on an exam.
UNDERLYING ASSUMPTIONS • Understanding human behavior requires first understanding how we perceive the social environment. • People seek a stable and predictable environment in order to control their surroundings and predict others’ behavior. • To understand behavior, people look for dispositional qualities in others.
ATTRIBUTIONAL PROPOSITIONS • Outcomes generate positive or negative emotions and a search for the reasons for the outcome. • Attributions are organized into key dimensions that influence psychological consequences such as expectancy change or emotional feelings. • Attributional consequences impact behaviors such as achievement motivation.
WEINER’S (1972) ORIGINAL MODEL Internal External Task Difficulty Coaching Stable Ability Effort Strategy Preparation Performance Luck Officiating Unstable
ATTRIBUTION THEORY • Attributions – are reasons used to explain the causes of events or behaviors. • Attributions can be categorized into 2 dimensions: (a) locus of causality (i.e., internal or external), and (b) stability(i.e., stable or unstable). • Internal – the cause of the behavior or outcome is due to the person. • External – the cause of the behavior or outcome is due to situational factors.
ATTRIBUTIONAL BIASES • Fundamental Attribution Error – when judging others we underestimate the influence of external factors and overestimate the impact of internal factors. • Self-Serving Bias – people give themselves too much credit for what the do well and give external factors too much blame when they fail.
COGNITIVE STYLE • Cognitive Style – how a person perceives, processes, interprets and uses information. • Cognitive styles are preferences. • Brain dominance often factors into these styles. • Whole Brain Concept – considers person’s preference for (a) left versus right brain thinking and (b) conceptual versus experiential thinking.
Provide an example of one leader who might be a good example of each cognitive style.
PROBLEM-SOLVING STYLES • Myers-Briggs Type Indicator – measures how people prefer to gather and evaluate information to solve problems and make decisions. • The MBTI uses 4 different pairs of attributes to classify people into 16 personality types. • introversion versus extraversion, • sensing versus intuition, • thinking versus feeling, • judging versus perceiving.
