Personality Traits, Leadership Theories, and Motivation Types
Personality Traits
A personality trait is the tendency to act, think, and feel in a certain way—over time and across situations.
Personality Traits:
- Openness: How open we are to new experiences, fantasy, aesthetics, feelings, art.
- Conscientiousness: Refers to reliability, being pragmatic, being diligent, doing your work on time.
- Extraversion: Getting recharged by spending more time with people. Warmth, Assertiveness, Activity, Excitement Seeking, Positive Emotions.
- Agreeableness: How trusting and straightforward we are, and how we collaborate with others.
- Trust, Straightforwardness, Altruism, Compliance, Modesty, Conformism.
- Neuroticism (Emotional Stability): Emotional stability, how many negative emotions and thoughts do we have? Anxiety, Hostility, Depression, Self-Consciousness, Impulsiveness, Fragility.
Which of these are most connected to teamwork? → Agreeableness and Conscientiousness (you need to have a certain number of team members that are high in this one, but not all of them).
Which are most connected to/predictive of leadership? → Extroversion helps, but there is one that is more predictive of leadership = that is Neuroticism (emotional stability). The more you control your stability to your personal state, the less they are bothered by the negative things and are able to handle a crisis for example.
Leadership Concepts and Theories
Traits
The Great Man Theory → «Leaders are born, not made» is the basic assumption here.
Attribution Error and Leadership
“Leadership attribution error”: the tendency to believe that leaders have more impact on results than they actually do. It usually arises because followers do not have the full picture of the team, underestimating both situational factors and chance.
Behaviors
Here leadership was evaluated through people behavior, this becomes a big shift on how leadership was perceived.
The Michigan Studies of Leadership:
Leadership behaviors can be divided into 2:
- Leadership behaviors oriented to structure
- Leadership behaviors that are about consideration
Transactional vs. Transformational Leadership
Transactional: more focused on the status quo. I pay you and you work for me. There’s a more notion of hierarchy between teams that have a transactional leader. And all the team focused on short-term results. Here it is not necessary to be charismatic.
Transformational: drive change and to change long strategic goals.
Charisma is an essential part of transformational leadership.
The vision of the leader needs to be shared with team members.
The focus is more on the long-term. We are delegating leadership, and it is sometimes a problem for leaders to delegate power.
→ Do you think that transformational leadership implies that the leader should be very positive/friendly,…? Relationships are key, but generally you can be a transformational leader being neither positive nor friendly. For example, Steve Jobs is a transformational leader.
Contingency
The key to good leadership is influence, not authority.
(supportive behavior |, directive behavior _) D,S,C,D
- Supporting: the decision making power is distributed between the followers. You are contributing ideas with the followers and the leader is one more member of the team.
- Coaching/Selling: high directive and high supportive = somewhat higher participation of followers, you ask for feedback. The leaders sell the clear ideas instead of imposing them on them.
- Delegating: contributing with the team
- Directing
Relationships
Leader-Member Exchange Theory
A relational approach
The current Leader-Member Exchange Theory focuses on the QUALITY of the relationship with each team member.
>> The higher the quality, the more you are able to empower your team members
With the evolution of theory and practice, experts recommend that a leader should always make the effort to develop a high- quality relationship with team members.
Leadership and Gender
-Leadership Styles: Women tend to adopt a more democratic/participative style, while men lean towards a more autocratic/directive approach. However, organizational studies found no major gender differences in task- vs. people-oriented leadership.
-Effectiveness in Different Environments: Women are perceived as less effective in male-dominated settings and leadership roles considered masculine. Men are seen as more effective in government, while no gender differences appear in female-dominated organizations.
-Self vs. External Evaluations: Men rate themselves higher in leadership effectiveness, while external evaluations consistently rate women higher, especially in business and middle management roles.
Types of Motivation
4 types of motivation:
- EXTRINSIC: external outcome/motivation: money, recognition, status…
- Money, benefits, awards.
- Avoiding punishment (its creating a negative motivation)
- Status
- INTRINSIC: it’s inside the person. Is its willingness.
- Learning
- Growth and development
- Interest, curiosity and enjoyment
- RELATIONAL: the outcome you are looking for (you are motivated for) is to maintain the relationships → you are motivated by relationships..
- Relationship with the company
- Relationship with the teammates/superiors
- Relationship with clients
- CONTRIBUTIVE: It’s about helping others, contributing into something else apart from my personal outcome.
- Contribution to society
- Responsibility
- Helping others
It looks at personality as a 2 part entity that has temperament at its core and character. Temperament is the part that is more fixed and difficult to change while character is more under control and we find it easy to learn new behaviors to control a little bit more.
Temperament
Some studies have studied the % determined by genes → between 40-60%
Is very difficult to change. It leads to automatic behaviors, it has to do with implicit behaviors, we are not always conscious of them.
- Novelty seeking
- Harm avoidance
- Reward dependence
- Persistence
Character
More linked to the lifestyle.
Part where we have more freedom to express our ___?
- Self directedness → self control
- Cooperativeness
- Self-transcendence → it has to do with certain personalities towards more artistic or more naturewise, religion… related to that higher-transcendental meaning, a purpose of life.
Assertiveness
Trait that is probably highly valued in leadership studies. It has to do with communication and being able to defend your point of view. Between passive and aggressive behavior we have assertive behavior. Being assertive is → completely able to be clear and express your points of view, say no, etc. WITHOUT moving more towards one than another.
High assertiveness → easier for you to have leadership behavior high in directive behavior. More difficult to adapt, to be flexible in your behavior
Ideal Team Capability Distribution
Ideal team capability distribution in a high-reliance team:
- Cognitive ability (adequate)
- Collective orientation (enough)
- Adaptability (particularly in dynamic settings)
- Conscientiousness (not everyone must be high)