Chapter 7 Summary

This chapter examined the relationship between personality traits, personality types, intelligence, and emotional intelligence with leadership success. In general, all of these attributes can help a leader to influence a group toward the accomplishment of its goals, but in and of themselves they are no guarantee of leadership success. Oftentimes, the situation will dictate which personality traits, components of intelligence, or emotional intelligence attributes will positively affect a leader's ability to influence a group.

Although the term personality has many different meanings, we use the term to describe one's typical, or characteristic patterns of behavior. There are several different theories to describe why people act in characteristic ways, but the trait approach to personality has been the most thoroughly researched, and as such plays a key role in the chapter. The adoption of the Five Factor Model (FFM) of personality has helped to clarify the personality-leadership relationships, and researchers have noted that leadership success is positively correlated with the FFM personality dimensions of surgency, dependability, agreeableness, and adjustment.

Personality types are another way of looking at distinctive behavioral patterns. The most popular test of types is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which measures a person's preferences on four major dimensions. Individuals' scores for these four dimensions are typically combined to define a psychological type.

The most recent theory for understanding intelligence divides it into three related components: analytic intelligence, practical intelligence, and creative intelligence. All three components are interrelated. Most research shows that leaders possess higher levels of analytic intelligence than the general population, and that more intelligent leaders often make better leaders. Analytic intelligence appears to confer two primary benefits upon leaders. First, leaders who are smarter seem to be better problem solvers. Second, and perhaps more important, smarter leaders seem to profit more from experience.

The roles of practical and creative intelligence in leadership are receiving increasing attention. Practical intelligence, or one's relevant job knowledge or experience, is proving to be extremely important for leaders. Leaders with higher levels of practical intelligence seem to be better at solving problems under stress. Moreover, practical intelligence seems to be the easiest of the three components to change. This implies that leaders should use techniques such as the action-observation-reflection model, described in Chapter 3, to extract the most learning from their experiences.

Creative intelligence involves developing new and useful products and processes, and creativity is extremely important to the success of many businesses today. Creativity consists of seven components, including synthetic abilities, analytic intelligence, practical intelligence, thinking skills, relevant personality traits, intrinsic motivation, and several environmental factors. Understanding the seven components of creativity is important a the factors can give leaders ideas about how to improve their own and their followers' creativity. It is important that leaders learn how to successfully stimulate and manage creativity, even more than being creative themselves.

In some ways emotional intelligence is a relatively new concept, and there are at least four different definitions of emotional intelligence. Generally, emotional intelligence has to do with understanding and responding to one's own and others' emotions. Leaders who can better align their thoughts and feelings with their actions may be more effective than leaders who think and feel one way about something but then do something different about it. Although emotional intelligence has helped to point out the role emotions and noncognitive abilities play in leadership success, much of it seems to be nothing more than another label for personality, If this is the case, then emotional intelligence may be a leadership fad that will fade away over time.