Personality of REAL Leaders

Why real in the title is uppercase? You got it, there are plenty of un-real leaders whose leadership styles harm their organizations. Sometimes the worst thing is that these un-real leaders believe they are the genuine leaders, the epitome, the alpha and omega of what a leader should be. Our tasks today are to describe the personalities of the real and the un-real leaders, to explain the leadership charisma which un-real leaders use to get ahead in organizations, and, in general, to reflect on the personality of leadership.

First let us unpack the real vs. un-real distinction. Famous management scholar Fred Luthans has distinguished between successful and effective managers (Luthans, 1988). Successful managers spend a lot of their time interacting with others, networking, politicking, and essentially managing their public image to get promoted faster. In contrast, effective managers: 1) communicate with their subordinates and superiors, 2) aim to increase the quantity and quality of their team’s performance, and 3) keep their subordinates job satisfaction and commitment high. Can managers be both successful and effective though? Sure. These unicorns masterfully balance communication, networking, traditional management activities (planning, controlling, and decision-making), and human resource activities (motivating, disciplining, managing conflict, staffing, coaching, and training/developing).

Now you might have been reading your John Kotter’s Leading Change recently and argue with me that a manager provides order and consistency (plans, budgets, organizes, and staffs) whereas a leader produces change and movement (establishes goals and vision, aligns teams, and builds commitment). Also, there are thousands of thought-provoking memes and quotes online what a manager does compared to what a leader does (e.g., When I talk to managers, I get the feeling they’re important. When I talk to leaders, I get the feeling I’m important.). I believe they represent the common desire for managers to actually be leaders and act as models for behavior, as people who will lead us THROUGH-and-TO something in our work, our career, and even our personal life. Companies nowadays build cultures of leadership and promise to train and develop leaders, but what they actually do is training and developing their supervisors, managers, directors, and executives. In other words, we all have lofty ideas and recommendations what a leader should be, but the reality is that leaders are not born, they are created, groomed, developed and chances are they will be managers at least in the early stages of their careers. Consider famous military leaders – you might think of them as the people giving fiery speeches and taking charge on white horses, but in reality, there is quite a lot of managerial work to do before the battle - recruiting trusted generals, planning the campaign, and procuring gold for the soldiers.

Hopefully, having agreed that a leader is the ideal development scenario for a manager, let us now inquire into the main questions who the effective leaders are and what their personality is. Multiple studies with executives show that effectiveness relates to higher Surgency (i.e., the gregariousness, activity, and positive emotions facets of Extraversion), higher Emotional Stability, and higher Conscientiousness (Hogan et al., 1994). Ones and Dilchert (2009) also found an almost perfect gradation of Big Five scores of supervisors, first-line managers, directors, C-suite executives (i.e., CFO, COO, CPO, etc.), and top executives. That is, each successive category of leaders had higher Big Five scores than the previous with top executives having the highest scores. Interestingly, top executives had more homogenous personality than other leaders with greatest consistency observed for Openness to Experience, Extraversion, and Emotional Stability. Once at the top, they all look very similar personality-wise, is that it?

Not really. There is the delicate question of profiling here, not just how high a leader is on the Big Five factors. The combination of high Extraversion, Openness to Experience, and Emotional Stability makes a leader very charismatic and seemingly effective. Being self-confident, having the gift of the gab, and having captivating ideas – who wouldn’t listen to such a leader? However, such a leader might turn out to be a just charisma without coverage so to say. Charismatic leaders care to advance only personal goals and do not solve the problems of their followers, do not elevate the followers to a higher level of physical and mental existence. Howell (1988) hypothesized that charismatic leadership comes in socialized (followers-oriented) and personalized (leader-oriented) subtypes which both have high need for power (McClelland, 1975). It is the rarer subtype of socialized charismatic leaders that inhibits their need to dominate over followers and always win. Socialized charismatics also seek to intrinsically motivate followers, make them autonomous, and groom them as the future leaders. In contrast, personalized charismatics use their attractiveness and radical visions, especially in times of crisis, to self-aggrandize, and gain unquestioning trust and obedience. According to Howell (1988) the two subtypes are not mutually exclusive, and personalized charismatics could sometimes be of worth, especially by inspiring, redirecting, and renewing ailing companies. The suggested dimensionality of charismatic leadership was supported by a recent study which showed that leadership charisma has curvilinear effect on perceived leader effectiveness (Vergauwe et al., 2018). Thus, when charisma turns into a pure, self-centered ambition, which contributes only to personal promotions and advancement, followers are left behind.

Let us elaborate more on personalized charismatics’ personality dynamics. Their Openness to Experience and Extraversion go into overdrive to create a shared vision, passionately communicate it, and excite followers. Think of it as a political rally of a very good actor politician who plays on the fears of the followers. This politician promises the followers to save them from a specific danger and funnily enough removing this danger usually benefits most the politician. However, then the politician has another rally where they proclaim the fight against another danger and the game of keeping followers as emotional hostages and gaslighting them goes on and on. You might think that the personalized charismatics thrive only in the political arena, but you would be wrong – so many of them are frantically climbing the career ladders in public and private organizations. These politician types of leaders are busy with managing their image and reputation and will not unexpectedly show up to a worker’s station, ask the worker how they are and how is work going, and eventually implement the needed changes requested by the worker.

I believe that the key to being charismatic, successful, and effective as a leader lies in having a good level (i.e., not low) of Agreeableness and Humility. As a leader, being agreeable can be invaluable especially during critical and trying times when the team has to bond together. For example, Chidester et al. (1991) found that the crews of friendly and warm aircraft captains made less errors compared to the crews of arrogant, hostile, and dictatorial captains. Of course, some people love to explain away their lower Agreeableness with having lots of stress. However, Mathisen et al. (2011) found this excuse to be moot because cold, cynical, and inconsiderate leaders bullied even when under low pressure/stress. Additionally, low leadership Agreeableness can be contagious on the reports and can have a trickle-down effect two levels down from the manager (Mawritz et al, 2012). In a nutshell, those below a disagreeable and aggressive leader learn socially to also be disagreeable and aggressive. However, let us also not forget the problem with all personality traits – being too much of a good thing too. Highly agreeable leaders might shy away from asserting themselves and as a result appear weak to other leaders. Sometimes a leader has to fight to secure the good results their followers were promised.

Now, let us turn our attention to Humility, the other personality trait of successful and effective leaders. Owens et al. (2013) defined humility in terms of three components: admitting mistakes and limitations, appreciating other’s strengths and contributions, and showing teachability which is openness towards learning and feedback. In the management bestseller Good to Great, Collins (2001) characterized the most effective leaders, the Level Five leaders, as highly humble and very motivated. According to Collins, humble leaders facilitate organizational learning through teachability, that is they perceive themselves as students and always learning from anyone in the company. Eventually, companies with humble leaders are more likely to outperform their competitors via superior learning, development, and adaptation (Wallace, Chiu & Owens, 2017).

In humility lies the good news for un-real leaders. Humility is unlike some personality traits which can change with great difficulty and change at best looks more like controlling and mitigating (e.g., controlling angry disposition with giving yourself some time, breathing, refocusing, etc.). Humility can be taught through failure, repentance, unlearning, and re-learning the correct behaviors. Once taught it cannot be unlearned. This view might sound to you quite dogmatic as if taken from some medieval Catholic order’s book of daily activities. Yet I encourage you to think about it as a process. Un-real leaders eventually fail, hopefully their followers stop them before this failure has widespread implications. Then they are confronted with the decision – to accept they failed and that they were wrong (humility) or to attribute the failure to the followers and hide their vulnerable self in a conflagration of narcissistic self-aggrandizement (I failed because despite being so good and capable, I am surrounded by such weak followers). In this moment there must be someone next to the leader – a coach, a counselor, anyone who can steer that leader’s decision in the right direction. For example, in the Italian mafia each syndicate boss gives immunity to his consigliere, his most trusted friend and confidant. The consigliere has the right to contradict the boss and basically tell them “You are full of s… your Mobsterness!”. Crime syndicates consider the killing each other’s consiglieres a sacrilege, think about that.

Once the un-real leader has recognized their failure and showed vulnerability, the time to repair the damage comes, because anecdotally leaders work for their followers and managers just give them work ??

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Chidester, R., Helmreich, R. L., Gregorich, S. E., & Geis, C. E. (1991). Pilot personality and crew coordination. International Journal of Aviation Psychology, 1, 25—44.

Collins, J. (2001). Good to Great: Why some companies make the leap and others don`t. New York, NY: Harper Collins.

Hogan, R., Curphy, G. J., & Hogan, J. (1994). What we know about leadership: Effectiveness and personality.?American Psychologist,?49(6), 493-504.

Howell, J. M. (1988). Two faces of charisma: Socialized and personalized leadership in organizations. In J. A. Conger & R. N. Kanungo (Eds.),?The Jossey-Bass management series. Charismatic leadership: The elusive factor in organizational effectiveness (pp. 213-236). San Francisco, CA, US: Jossey-Bass.

Luthans, F. (1988). Successful vs. effective real managers.?Academy of Management Perspectives,?2(2), 127-132.

McClelland, D.C. (1975). Power: The inner experience. New York: Irvington Publishers.

Mathisen, G. E., Einarsen, S., & Mykletun, R. (2011). The relationship between supervisor personality, supervisors’ perceived stress and workplace bullying.?Journal of Business Ethics,?99(4), 637-651.

Mawritz, M. B., Mayer, D. M., Hoobler, J. M., Wayne, S. J., & Marinova, S. V. (2012). A trickle‐down model of abusive supervision.?Personnel Psychology,?65(2), 325-357.

Ones, D. S., & Dilchert, S. (2009). How special are executives? How special should executive selection be? Observations and recommendations.?Industrial and Organizational Psychology,?2(2), 163-170.

Owens, B. P., Johnson, M. D., & Mitchell, T. R. (2013). Expressed humility in organizations: Implications for performance, teams, and leadership.?Organization Science,?24(5), 1517-1538.

Owens, B. P., & Heckman, D. R. (2016). How does leader humility influence team performance? Exploring the mechanisms of contagion and collective promotion focus. Academy of Management Journal 59 (3), 1088–11.

Vergauwe, J., Wille, B., Hofmans, J., Kaiser, R. B., & De Fruyt, F. (2018). The double-edged sword of leader charisma: Understanding the curvilinear relationship between charismatic personality and leader effectiveness.?Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,?114(1), 110-130.

Wallace, A. S., Chiu, C. Y. & Owens, B. P. (2017). Organizational humility and the better functioning business non-profit and religious organizations In E. L. Worthington, Jr., D. E. Davis, & J. N. Hook (Eds.), Handbook of humility: Theory, research, and application (pp. 246–259). New York, NY: Routledge.