BUS603: Managing People

In the following, I will specifically focus on leadership styles. Among leadership scholars, leadership styles – or behavioral tendencies – probably constitute the most common research area. Still, it can be considered a subset of a broader leadership domain, which encompasses, among others, leader knowledge, skills, and abilities [e.g., (emotional) intelligence, leader experience, and leader expertise;, motivation to lead, leadership roles, and leader-subordinate relational quality research. Leadership style, as used here, refers to the way a "leader" (i.e., somebody who has gained position power through a process of legitimation) tends to act toward people he or she directs or supervises. Popular leadership styles in the literature include – for example – autocratic and democratic leadership, directive and participative leadership, task- and relation-oriented leadership, charismatic leadership, and transformational and transactional leadership, but next to these mostly "bright" leadership styles, dark leadership styles have received an increasing amount of attention in the last two decades.

Contextualization occurs when a relevant context (or frame-of-reference) is added to a (generic or non-contextualized) personality questionnaire. Contextualization can be accomplished by completely rewriting personality items or by using a contextual "tag" to reflect a certain context (e.g., work, home, school, sports, etc…). In the case of leadership, a leadership-contextualized personality questionnaire can be constructed by rewriting personality items to reflect behaviors expressed by somebody in a hierarchical position or to add a tag such as "as a leader" to items. For instance, when contextualizing using a tag, a generic HEXACO (reversed) Agreeableness item "People sometimes tell me that I am too critical of others" would become "As a leader, people sometimes tell me that I am too critical of others".

Contextualized versions of personality scales have been found to be strongly (generally ≥ 0.65) related to their respective generic versions and they generally offer better validities than generic personality scales, mainly because contextualized scales reduce within-person inconsistencies in item responding. Consequently, leadership-contextualized personality questionnaires are likely to offer better validities in the prediction of leader-relevant outcomes than generic personality questionnaires.

In the following, I will offer five arguments why leadership styles can be considered contextualized personality traits. (1) The content domain of leadership styles can be considered a subset of personality traits. Whereas personality provides a parsimonious description of all possible human behaviors that are psychologically meaningful in all possible situations, in line with common definitions of leadership, leadership models restrict themselves to behaviors in a subset of situations, i.e., those that are relevant to the goal-directed (hierarchical) influence of one individual vis-à-vis a group of other individuals. (2) In so far leadership items refer to behavioral tendencies (or: leadership styles) instead of attributions made by subordinates, they are formulated equivalent to personality items. Terms that have been used to describe prototypical leadership, such as determined, decisive, organized, responsible, honest, and fair are the very same terms that have been used in lexical personality studies. Items in leadership questionnaires that describe actual behaviors (e.g., "criticizes poor work;") instead of subordinates' leadership attributions or evaluations, are highly similar to items in personality questionnaires that describe behaviors (e.g., "criticizes others' shortcomings;" see also the HEXACO Agreeableness item above). (3) Empirical evidence shows that leadership styles – like personality traits – are stable across time. (4) Leadership styles show similar levels of heritability and genetic correlations show "that there is a strong common source [italics added] of genetic variation underlying leadership and personality". And, last but not least, (5) there are strong relations between personality traits and leadership styles.

Although the first four arguments are theoretically and empirically straightforward, this may not be the case for the last argument. In fact, one of the consistent findings in most studies has been the relatively weak observed relations between personality traits and leadership styles, which has led to hypothesize that "leadership behaviors are more malleable, more transient, and less trait-like than one might otherwise believe". However, as I've argued elsewhere, the main reason for these relatively weak relations is the fact that all studies included in meta-analysis used leaders' self-ratings of personality and subordinate-ratings of leadership, which introduces an important cross-source upper limit restriction, i.e., that the maximum possible correlation between two different variables obtained from two different sources is equal to the minimum cross-source correlation of one of these two variables.

The upper limit of cross-source correlations of the same variable (i.e., self-other agreement) in work settings is generally low; not surpassing the r = 0.25 level for leadership and r = 0.30 for personality. The fact that none of the meta-analytic zero-order correlations in cross-source meta-analysis surpassed r = 0.17 (between extraversion and charismatic leadership), is thus understandable when taking the cross-source upper limit into account. When correcting for low cross-source correlations, obtained strong – and consistent – estimates of the relations between personality and leadership styles. That is, charismatic, supportive, and ethical leadership were strongly related to respectively extraversion (β = 0.76), agreeableness (β = 0.74), and honesty-humility (β = 0.50), with only task-oriented leadership having a somewhat weaker relation with conscientiousness (β = 0.33).

These corrected relations offer strong support for a contextualized interpretation of leadership style scales. According to, charismatic leadership can be considered a contextualized version of extraversion because of the social self-esteem, social boldness, energy, and enthusiasm typical for both extraversion and charismatic leadership; ethical leadership can be considered a contextualized version of honesty-humility because both involve behaviors expressive of sincerity, fairness, and greed avoidance; supportive leadership can be considered a contextualized version of agreeableness (but also some extraversion), because both involve gentleness, patience, flexibility, and tolerance when dealing with subordinates' problems; and finally, task-oriented leadership can be (partly) considered a contextualized version of conscientiousness, because both have to do with order, discipline, and perfectionism when carrying out tasks. Consequently, these four leadership styles – when operationalized as behavioral tendencies – seem to overlap to a large extent with personality traits commonly found in personality models and they may be, accordingly, regarded as contextualized versions of these four traits.

In the following, I will argue that the "negative" pole of three of these four traits are associated with what I will call the "Three Nightmare Traits" (TNT). That is, especially leaders who are characterized by low honesty-humility (henceforth called "leader dishonesty"), low agreeableness ("leader disagreeableness"), and low conscientiousness ("leader carelessness") may have important negative effects on their subordinates, their organization, and in some cases even society at large.