The quest to find a set of characteristics shared by leaders is what we call the Leadership Traits approach. “The trait approach was one of the first systematic attemps to study leadership”, according to Peter Northouse (2004).
A large number of leadership studies were conducted through all the 20th century trying to establish the leader’s most important traits. In other words, all these leadership studies focused their attention on finding a set of personal characteristics that define a great leader.
Development of the Leadership Studies on Traits
The first half of the 20th century saw the appearance of the so-called “Great Man Theories”, they’re called this way because of the argued qualities that leaders should have to be great politicians, religious leader, or army leader.
These theories were challenged by Dr. Ralph Melvin Stogdill in 1948 when he stated that “A person does not become a leader by virtue of the possession of some combination of traits” in his famous survey about the studies of the first half of the century (Stogdill, 1948). For this particular study Stogdill analyzed more than 124 leadership studies starting from 1904.
Later on, in a second review in 1974, Stogdill analyzed 163 studies that were conducted between 1948 and 1970. While in the first review Stogdill put his attention on situational factors and not in personal traits. In his second review he was more balanced to assign importance also to the leader’s traits. As a matter of fact, it “validated the original trait idea that the leader’s characteristics are indeed a part of Leadership” (Northouse, 2004).
Going back to 1959, Richard D. Mann analyzed more than 1400 findings regarding personality and performance in small groups, expressing based on that study that leaders exhibit the following traits: Intelligence, masculinity, dominance, adjustment, extroversion, and conservatism. Later on, in 1986 a group led by Robert G. Lord, took another view to Mann’s observations and determined that the first 3 characteristics recently named, are related to the way people perceives leaders.
Just like these examples, you can find a lot more of leadership qualities and traits identified by the theorists. One interesting point here is that traits tend to vary from author to author.
The next chart is a brief list of traits of some researchers:
| Stogdill(1948) | Intelligence, Alertness, Insight, Responsibility, Iniative, Persistence, Self Confidence, Sociability |
| Mann (1959) | Intelligence, Masculinity, Dominance, Adjustment, Extroversion, Conservatism |
| Stogdill(1974) | Achievement, Persistence, Insight, Iniiative, Self-confidence, Responsibility, Cooperativeness, tolerance, Influence, Sociability |
| Lord, DeVader, and Alliger (1986) |
Intelligence, Masculinity, Dominance |
| Kouzes & Posner(1993)* | Honest, Forward Looking, Competent, Inspiring, Intelligent, Fair Minded, Broad-minded, Supportive, Straighforward, dependable |
You can see clearly that every researcher has its own set of traits that define a leader. Thus, it’s evident that the set of traits is as diverse as the researchers that supposedly “found them”.
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Leadership
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[...] It’s recognized to be the first systematic attemp to study leadership from a scientific point of view. In simple terms, the trait approach tried to identify the qualities and characteristics of great political, religious and army leaders. The goal was to find a set of traits that defined the great leaders. The studies that tried to find such traits are also referred as the Great Man theories. A key fact of these studies is that they concentrated all the efforts watching the “leader”, without taking into account, the context or the followers. (Want to learn more?, check The Traits Approach) [...]
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