This article outlines the author’s attempt to rethink and articulate his implicit leadership theories inclusive of the personality traits and behaviors characterizing effective leaders in today’s globalized world. It points to some enduring issues that arise once research on personality psychology is incorporated to revise such theories and reflect on the nature and origins of the traits often assigned to effective leaders. It postulates that servant leaders who aim to build a better world deserve to be entitled to twenty-first-century leaders.
Implicit in some discussions around “The 21st Century Leader” are assumptions of romanticized effectiveness rooted in individual and collective consciousness. Unlike the word “manager”, the mere perception of the word “leader”, with its connotational, emotional, and imaginative associations, often drives us to picture individuals that are both intellectually compelling and emotionally satisfying. Accordingly, after trait spectrums and dispositions are identified, our imaginary leaders are assumed the best of traits and the best of dispositions, resulting in a romanticized, seemingly identical Great Individual who practices an art of leadership that has vastly outstripped reality.
Picturing leaders, including those of the 21st century, as individuals with particular fixed personality traits raises several issues as the nature and origins of such traits are closely examined. First, the belief that all individuals have enduring, stable qualities consistent in all situations is no longer considered a common-sensical premise among personality psychologists. Instead, personality traits are considered “relatively consistent tendencies to think, feel, or behave in a characteristic way across a range of situations” (Kosslyn & Rosenberg, 2010, p. 302). Notice the emphasis on relatively in the definition. We tend to think of a person who is conscientious or extravert as consistently conscientious or extravert across all situations. Yet, both empirical research and our personal experiences have proven otherwise.
Many researchers have reported that the likelihood that a person will behave in similar ways is largely influenced by the similarity of the situations (Hartshorne & Mary, 1928; Magnusson, 2003; Mischel, 2004; Mischel & Schoda, 1995). Hartshorne & Mary (1928), for instance, investigated whether the trait of honesty applies across situations among grade school children and concluded that being honest in some situations did not necessarily mean being honest in others. Our classification of individuals as either honest or dishonest, conscientious or not conscientious, extravert or introvert does not imply that those who fall in one category always behave accordingly with no exception.
It is not implied, however, that a person’s behavior is completely governed by the situation (the theory of situationism in personality psychology) since similar situations are experienced differently by individuals with different personalities (Shoda & Lee Tiernan, 2002). Also, our situations are, to some extent, chosen and created by our personalities (Kosslyn & Rosenberg, 2010). An individual with high levels of neuroticism, for instance, is more likely to create tense situations than another with lower levels (A. H. Buss, 1995). The foregoing examples are intended to shift attention to the theory of interactionism, the posit that an interaction between both internal traits and external situations yields additional insight into the personalities of individuals beyond the information provided by either the traits or the situation alone.
The reference to interactionism is key in the reexamination of all personality traits we tend to associate with our imaginary 21st-century leaders. Our depiction of leaders as individuals who score higher levels of conscientiousness, emotional stability, agreeableness, and open-mindedness and lower levels of neuroticism on the Big Five Personality Test sometimes lacks the acknowledgment of potential inconsistencies, shortcomings, and imperfections present in most individuals.
Closely related to the foregoing issue, picturing the 21st-century leader as a person imbued with an amalgamation of specific personality traits foregrounds a second concern related to the very nature of these traits. Historically, early attempts to describe individuals, in their complexity, in terms of constructs that constitute units of personality are credited to Gordon W. Allport, a founding figure of personality psychology, who deviated from the psychoanalytical, behavioral, and humanistic approaches to personality and aimed at locating every term that describes individuals in English dictionaries. Having identified more than 4500 English words, Allport and Odbert (1936) proposed that all the descriptive words (which refer to traits) are to be organized in a three-level hierarchy of Cardinal Traits, Central Traits, and Secondary Traits to account for the uniqueness of every person’s personality.
The list was narrowed down to 171 traits by Carttel (1946, 1957) through factor analysis and then further into 16 broader dimensions outlined in his 16 Personality Factors (PF). The dimensions are named: abstractedness, apprehension, dominance, emotional stability, liveliness, openness to change, perfectionism, privateness, reasoning, rule-consciousness, self-reliance, sensitivity, social boldness, tension, vigilance, and warmth; each represents a continuum of opposite traits, in the highest and lowest extremes, adopted to assess individuals and represent their scores. Later on, the search for a more manageable set of personality traits urged the adoption of five separable dimensions -open-mindedness, conscientiousness, extraversion/ introversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism- that seem to cover a large number of seemingly disparate descriptions of human personality.
Every person is in certain respects like all other persons, like some other persons, and like no other person (Kluckhohn & Murray, 1948). Though boiling down personality traits into the “Big Five” facilitates inquiry, it can sometimes result in a reductionist view of individuals. Before picturing the traits characterizing effective leaders, it is necessary to bear in mind that the broader the scale, the blurrier the picture. Two leaders can be equally effective. In the aforementioned scales, their scores would be closely related or possibly identical; yet, the discrepancy between their behavioral, emotional, and cognitive tendencies unfolds only upon zooming into the details that construct their personalities.
Thus far, with careful consideration of the interrelated first and second issues relevant to our discussion, it is not unplausible to conclude that while effective leaders might share a few core personality traits displayed in a relatively consistent way over time and across situations, they can still exhibit unique tendencies and dispositions that distinguishes one from the other. This possibly justifies why little agreement was garnered to identify universal traits of leaders (Bird, 1940; House & Aditya, 1997).
A third, tacit issue that arises in our reflections about leaders’ personality traits is the origin of such traits, whether it is nature or nurture. Though the Great Man Theory, which reflects the prevailing belief in the 19th century that “great leaders” are individuals endowed with divine inspiration and extraordinary abilities associated with genetic predispositions not possessed by others, no longer counts as a valid theory, investigating why and how individuals develop the kind of personality traits they have is not as intuitive as it might appear. As we attempt to draw a profile for the 21st-century leader, provided that the core personality traits demanded by ineffective leadership are identified, what is it that drives certain individuals to develop such personality traits, while others do not? Is it a matter of biology and/or upbringing? Or just an accident and mere luck?
Starting with biology, though it is tempting to think that genes, cognition, and neurophysiology do not influence personality traits, research in neuro-psychology, cognitive psychology, and behavioral genetics presents empirical evidence that proves otherwise. Some aspects of personality are biologically based, and psychologists use the term temperament to refer to an inclination to think, feel, or behave in particular ways (Kosslyn & Rosenberg, 2010, p. 314); an inclination that arises from the environmentally moderated effects of genes and biology and can give rise to different personality traits. One example is Buss and Plomin’s (1984) four dimensions of temperament, sociability, emotionality, activity, and impulsivity, the first two of which nearly correspond to the Big Five personality traits. Temperaments manifest in children’s behavior from early ages, and several studies found that a child’s early temperament at age 3 is correlated with her or his personality at age 17 (Capsi, 2000; Chess & Thomas, 1996).
Several biologically based theories of personality exist in the literature. These include Gray’s (1987, 1991) Behavioral Activation and Inhibition Systems (BAS and BIS), Eysenck & Eysenck’s (1967) theory of personality, Cloninger et al.’s (1993) four dimensions of personality, Zuckerman's (1989) and Zuckerman et al.’s (1999) theory, and others. Aside from temperament, research on the genetics of personality has described some of the genes’ influence over different personality dimensions indicating the heritability of personality and, thus, the possible heritability of specific behaviors (Angleitner et al., 1995; Bouchard, 2004; Heath & Martin, 1990; Loehlin, 1992; Pederson et al., 1988; as cited in Kosslyn & Rosenberg, 2010, p., 314).
Nonetheless, these findings do not indicate that our personalities are entirely predetermined by biological factors alone. From a socio-cognitive perspective, our personalities are reciprocally determined by an interplay between our cognition on the one hand, and our experiences, patterns of mental processing, self-concept, self-efficacy, perceived locus of control, and sociocultural environments, on the other. Even earlier than that, the Freudian psycho-analytical approach to personality highlighted the influence of the superego which holds all the internalized values and morals an individual acquires from his or her surrounding society and implied the importance of one’s surroundings in the successful completion of the proposed five psychosexual stages.
The influence of one’s upbringing over his or her personality is also emphasized by Neo-Freudian psychodynamic theories, which expanded but broke away from the psychoanalytic school of Freud, with Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, and Karen Horney. These influences are pointed to by Alder’s (1925) emphasis on the feelings of inferiority and birth order effects (also by Sulloway, 1996), Jung’s (1991) emphasis on collective consciousness, and Horney’s (1993) emphasis on the importance of parent-child interactions. Likewise, the influence of one’s upbringing is also pointed to by several Humanistic psychologists. Carle Rogers, for instance, argued that labeling children as “bad” may affect their developing self-concept or self-worth (Kamins & Dweck, 1999).
Integrating the Freudian psychoanalytic approach, Neo-Freudian psychodynamic approaches, humanistic approaches, and socio-cognitive approaches with current research on cognitive psychology, neurophysiology, developmental psychology, and behavioral genetics increases our capacity to engage with the multidimensional, complex nature of each individual, and thus each leader’s personality. Yet, it is not often the case that while a large number of individuals might exhibit traits and behaviors that indicate potential leaders, only a few succeed because of external, favorable situations.
In organizational contexts, a drastically different view of the driving forces behind leadership emerged in the late 1940s and early 1950s following a series of studies (e.g., Bird, 1940; Stogdill, 1948; Mann, 1959) when the idea that leaders who are effective in one situation may not necessarily be as effective in other situations was forwarded. Situational contingency theories of leadership illustrate that while certain leadership styles (e.g., transformational, democratic participative, etc.) are appealing, they are not always effective. An effective leader hence knows and can practice the appropriate leadership style that best fits each situation (e.g., the competencies of her or his followers, the nature of their relationship, the degree of power she or he has, how structured each task is, etc.)
Though the concept of leadership remains, to some extent, elusive and enigmatic, even with the presence of hypothetical core personality traits and optimum leadership styles necessary for effective leadership, an individual cannot become a leader without another component central to the phenomenon of leadership. A Vision.
Leadership is a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal (Northouse, 2010, p. 3). Still, exploring our implicit leadership theories can sometimes sway us away from the two-way, interactive nature of leadership, the nature of the leader-follower relationship, and the nature of vision to focus more on articulating the nature of the hard and soft skills of the leader.
The increasing globalized consciousness in all sectors and societies of today’s world has paved the way for several opportunities and challenges that call for a restructuring of our conceptual framework of what leadership is to be practiced. With a clear articulation of core principles guiding the twenty-first leadership vision, the identification of twenty-first-century leaders can be easily achieved. The author’s view aligns with Allen et al., (2006) that the purpose of leadership in the twenty-first century is (a) to create a supportive environment where people can thrive, grow, and live in peace with one another; (b) to promote harmony with nature and thereby provide sustainability for future generations; and (c) to create communities of reciprocal care and shared responsibility where every person matters and each person’s welfare and dignity is respected and supported (p. 1).
This view of twenty-first-century leadership falls under the broader paradigm of servant-leadership, described and argued for by several scholars (e.g., Greenleaf; Covey; Jones, Moxley, Beazley and Beggs, Williams, DePree, Bennis, Zohar, Ruschman, Cooper and Trammell, Showkeir, Bogle, Carver, Smith and Farnsworth, Burkhardt and Spears, Young, Jaworski, Braye, Hock, Webster, Schuster, Wheatley, Spears, described in Spears & Lawrence (2002). The best test for such leadership is to ask if those served to grow as persons, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, and more likely to become servants (Greenleaf, 1970).
To reiterate, twenty-first-century leadership is not narrowly restricted to a single context (i.e., political, entrepreneurial, spiritual, etc.) nor is it practiced by a single leadership style. It does not require ideal personality traits or enormous visions. Rather, it encompasses every leadership practiced to make the world, or part of it, a better place. A political, spiritual, or religious leader can be a twenty-first-century leader by mobilizing public support for causes that promote human values of tolerance and mutual respect. An educational leader can be a twenty-first-century leader with a goal and plan of improving the quality of education and creating learning environments inclusive of all students. An entrepreneurial leader can be a twenty-first-century leader by combining her or his influence over followers with enough consideration for their well-being as they co-achieve a vision that builds a better world.
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