Trait theory of leadership

For any company it is essential to always step up its game and keep growing its team, but how can they do that? How can they discover who will be a great leader in the future?

In this case there are some leadership theories, defined leader-centric, which can help them in sorting the most promising leaders. Most precisely today we will analyze the Trait theory of leadership.

As the name suggests, it is focused on the identification of peculiar traits which can be both physical or personal, that can be used to differentiate leaders from followers.

Indeed, it claims that leaders were born with some inborn abilities to lead, thus or you have them or it is very hard to cover your deficiencies, especially in the short run!

So we might argue that Albert Einstein was exceptional because of his unique intelligence and that no one ever reached his level as his intellect was one of a kind. Or that we all love Tony Stark, from Iron Man, since his great self confidence motivates ourselves too, and that anybody will be like him.

To be more precise, we are going to use a very famous and well accepted model written in 1994 by Hogan et al., which condenses the most relevant traits to look for are summarized within the Big Five Personality Dimensions. 

To better understand this model we can start analyzing someone like Donald Trump, the former US president, and Mark Zuckerbeg, CEO of Facebook.

Let’s start with some insights, looking at some of the thoughts they shared. 

The first one is Donald Trump.

Talking about his purpose he said:

“I mean, part of the beauty of me is that I’m very rich”

“I like thinking big. If you’re going to be thinking anything, you might as well think big.”

Referring to people:

“Leaders, true leaders, take responsibility for the success of the team, and understand that they must also take responsibility for the failure.”

And lastly about performance: 

“Part of being a winner is knowing when enough is enough. Sometimes you have to give up the fight and walk away, and move on to something that's more productive”

Now let’s see what Zuckerberg said about similar topics.

Purpose:

“Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.”

People:

“At Facebook we have tradition where…the whole company gets together and stays up all night and tries building things – whatever they want”

Performance:

“The biggest risk is not taking any risk... In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks”

Now, let’s compare them! 

Mark is clearly much more on the introverted side rather than Trump, who makes a big fuss over everything in order to attract more attention.

Instead they can be seen both on the disagreeableness side, especially for some of their questionable manners (who knows what Facebook does with our data?).

Moving to the conscientiousness, we can infer that Mark seems more neat  and responsible than Trump, who is impulsive and sometimes unscrupulous.

They both are very emotionally stable, since they seem very secure and unflappable.

With the last comparison against the Openness, Mark is definitely very open, as he is imaginative and curious, whilst Trump is more on the thigh-mindedness side.

Thus we see that they do not always have the best result against the Big Five Personalities, nevertheless they have been able to become great leaders!

This brings to the last point, as the Trait theory of leadership is helpful in predicting the emergence of leaders, but it is far from being a perfect model!

Furthemore, even if someone may has all the necessary traits to become a leader, it is still possible that she will not be effective and will fail to succeed!

What to do now?

Try to think of yourself, how do you measure against the Big Five Traits?

To help your evaluation, you can also click here to the test online and see which type of traits you have!