Leadership:Understanding its Global Impact

Chapter 4:The person of the leader

Learning objectives

• Understand the personality traits that contribute to effective leadership

• Identify and assess the strength of your own personality traits

• Describe the cognitive factors associated with effective leadership

• Discuss the impact of gender on leadership

• Summarise your leadership strengths and take action to build upon them

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Chapter contents• Spotlight: BOSS True Leaders Survey• Introduction• The big five personality traits• Leader in action: Sue Gordon• Cognitive factors underpinning leadership• Other personality style indicators• Gender and leadership• Strengths and limitations of the focus on the person• Reflection • Summary• Case study: Ecolab

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Spotlight: BOSS True Leaders Survey

• BOSS traits:– courage– strength– integrity– intelligence– conviction– clear sightedness

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• Assisting leaders to understand who they are … why they do the things they do … to provide further guidance on understanding yourself … to better understand others … to be a better leader.

Introduction

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• Surgency

• Agreeableness

• Adjustment

• Conscientiousness

• Openness to experience(Judge, Heller & Mount 2002)

Big five personality traits

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When asked to comment on leadership qualities … Sue cites people skills at the top of the list. ‘Some (leaders)’ she said, ‘lead by example, some are aggressive, some screech at people. But if you work with people, you get more out of people’

Leader in action: Sue Gordon

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• Research links a leader’s thinking style to their behaviour

• People have different learning styles and will take different meanings from the same data or experience

• Leaders must learn the way in which they and their team members prefer to process information

Cognitive factors underpinning leadership skills

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• Information gathering– sensing– intuiting

• Information evaluating– thinking– feeling

• Carl Jung (1923)

Measuring cognitive style

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• The Myers Briggs Personality Type Indicator (MBTI)

• Individuals classified as:– Extroverted (E) or Introverted (I)– Sensing (S) or Intuitive (N)– Thinking (T) or Feeling (F)– Perceiving (P) or Judging (J)

Other personality style indicators

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• Sex differences in leadership styles: differences are … not especially impactful and do not relate to any differences in the effectiveness of men and women leaders

(Eagley & Johnson 2006)

Gender and leadership

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• Situational factors can affect personality

• Difficult to place human beings … neatly into boxes

• The Reflected Best Self (RBS) exercise. (Roberts et al. 2005)

Strengths and limitations of focus

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• Big five personality traits - relationship between personality dimensions/effective leadership/job performance

• Understanding cognitive style - building blocks of a person’s self-concept– information gathering– information evaluating (MBTI)

• Sex differences - not especially impactful

• Improve leadership strengths: Reflected Best Self (RBS) exercise

Summary

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• How has clearly articulating Ecolab’s organisational values and vision assisted in recruiting future leaders into the organisation?

• How could knowing and understanding their personality traits assist prospective employees to increase their chances of employment in organisations that, like Ecolab, recruit on the basis of future leadership capability?

• Find and review the recruitment policy for the organisation you work with or one you know of. Does your organisation recruit on the basis of technical skills or leadership potential? If it recruits on a skill base, should it?

Case study: Ecolab

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