Category: Big Five Personality Traits

Personality Traits And Leadership Styles

Posted on | by Laureen

Personality Traits And Leadership Styles

Introduction

These assessments helped me understand what kind of leader I want to be and have given me a plan to improve my leadership skills. I have developed an idea of the potential my leadership has in my professional and personal life. With the help of leadership, we can uplift, inspire, and, most of all, help others realize their potential. With a lot of hard-working and patience, it is a skill that will improve over time by learning from more experienced leaders. It is a journey that would not be smooth or straight, and it is a never-ending journey. It is a growth and development journey for both the people around me and me, so we might pass on a sense of purpose and confidence in those we touch. My objective will be to strengthen my essential skills, including being forward-looking, competent, and inspiring (Krell, 2015).

Background

To better understand the role of personality trait in leadership, or in other words, you can say leadership attributes, the theory named Great Man Theory came into existence. The first leadership researcher to summarise the results was Ralph Stogdill. He concluded that some personal characteristics, such as intellectual, friendly nature, and many others were significantly related to leadership success (Hughes et al.,2019,p.176).

Personality Traits Assessment

Personality traits help to forecast overall job performance and career success (Hughes et al.,2019,p.188). After taking the Myers-Briggs personality assessment, I realized that my personality type is ENFJ (Extrovert, Intuitive, Feeler, Judger). This is often referred to as the Energizer. ENFJ’s are strong extraverts, and they motivate and support other peoples in different ways (Cherry,2020). I believe this is true as I always make several decisions on impulse. Although this can be exciting and rewarding, it can lead to being a costly and consequent personality trait. As an intuitor, working with tangled situations is my major strength, and being impatient is my weakness. My strength is considering others’ feelings, while my weakness is being unorganized as a feeler. As a judger, I may stick to a specific task, yet I can sometimes be resistant. I feel this assessment is very accurate, and identifying personality strengths and weaknesses will enable me to overcome future situations more efficiently.

Leadership Style Assessment

Leadership style assessment is the analysis of the skills and styles of an individual as a leader (Cyprus, 2020). As per the result of the online assessment, my leadership style is transformational. Transformational leaders motivate the followers to give high-levels of performance and help them to possess their leadership potential (Riggio, 2009). Transformational leaders use emotions as the key to achieving better results (Hughes et al.,2019,p.213). Some abilities of a transformational leader are:

  • Transformational leaders have the ability to take the right risks.
  • Transformational leaders motivate team members to innovate new ideas that are beneficial for the organization (Ismail, 2020).
  • Transformational leaders entertain follower’s ideas.
  • Transformational leaders are known for inspiring other peoples.

For example, one of the best transformational leaders the world has ever seen is Steve Jobs. He made his message clear in the minds of each employee about the company’s vision. Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple company, challenged his employees to think beyond and create innovative ideas that benefit his company (Bhasin, 2020).

Relationship Between Two Assessments

The results of both assessments are almost similar and correlated with each other. Leadership involves giving guidance to team members and provides them with directions. Business success depends on good leadership leads to success or failure. On the other hand, Personality traits help to determine the kind of leadership that a leader exercises. Successful leadership is predicted by personality traits. Thus, I believe that personality traits play an important role in becoming a leader. Both of the assessment results state that I am good at building relationships with the team members, which helps motivate them to create innovative ideas.

Strengths and Weakness

The following are the strengths and their relation to my leadership style:

  • A good relationship with team members: All the company’s objectives are accompalished by building good relationships with team members. This behavior of a leader helps in communication while managing a team. Apart from that, it also helps in keeping employees engaged in the vision and mission of the company. For, e.g., I always communicate with my team at the current workplace and frequently ask them if they face any difficulties while working.
  • Allocating the right jobs: Knowing the ability of each team member is required for segregating the workforce. This strength helps the leader in allocating different job roles as per the ability and efficiency level of the team members. Reducing work pressure, which is not required, is the primary goal of a transformational leader. Therefore, this strength of mine enables me to influence the team members to achieve different goals on time. E.g., I will always ask a person to solve customer complaints who have great experience in the organization rather than giving to a person who has just joined recently.
  • Steadiness: A good leader always tries to give equal opportunity to every individual within the team. With the help of appraisal and recognition, consistency strength is helping me to reduce discrimination practices among the organization.
  • Compatability: Reducing conflicts within the organization is an essential factor for improving the decision-making process. A transformational leader always considers innovative ideas from the employees and reconciles their differences in making the final decision. I believe that giving significant judgment helps to reduce conflicts within the employees’ viewpoint.
  • Positive attitude: Having a positive attitude helps me to motivate team members to achieve the goal of the organization. Moreover, as a transformational leader, this positive attitude influences me to implement different tools that help me to boost the team member’s overall performance.

The following stated are some of the weakness:

  • Adverse outcomes are developed sometimes: Sometimes, negative outcomes occur with the positives ones. The best example of this could be Adolf Hitler as a transformational leader. The repercussions of his achievement led his people away from moral betterment (Romgens, 2012).
  • Communication: As I think that building a good relationship with the team members is beneficial, it can certainly affect my decision-making process. It is possible that some employees can take advantage of my decent behavior for implementing their decision as to the final decision. It will bring a high chance of conflict between the employees and will create difficulties while achieving objectives.
  • Employees’ freedom may sometimes backfire: A transformational leader is open to independent thinking and encourages their employees to think outside the box. There is a lot of freedom given to the employees regarding deadlines, thinking, structure, and guidelines. Although this works well in some cases, it can backfire if they take you for granted. For, e.g., I didn’t take any action against one of my employees regarding not completing the job given to her, but due to this, other employees too didn’t finish their job on time.

Action Plan

  • I will make a list in which I note down the ways to reward my team members who have done something exceptionally well. And will try my best to give rewards to those hard-working efforts (Krell, 2015).
  • Will create an understanding between each other where it becomes comfortable for everyone to give and take feedback (Krell, 2015).
  • To expand my understanding of leadership, I will always observe and learn from more experienced leaders (Krell, 2015).
  • Before the interaction with team members, I will ask myself this question: ‘What will I do in this interaction to make the person feel more comfortable and powerful?’ (Krell, 2015).
  • Once in week, I will ask all the team members to answer this question: ‘what have you done in the last week to improve so that you are improved this week than you were a week ago?’ (Krell, 2015).
  • I will build a friendly relationship with the team members and make sure they take things seriously and not for granted. And fulfill the tasks given to them on time. For this, I will be harsh on them when needed (Krell, 2015).
  • I will be open to all the feedback and take it positively to grow and develop my leadership skills. (Hughes et al.,2019,p267) For this, I will conduct 360-degree feedback in which feedback from the boss, peers, team members, and self feedbacks are taken.
  • I will work on self to develop as a leader. (Hughes et al.,2019,p176) As American psychologist R.T.Hogan well says,’ Everyone is a star in their own movie. Unfortunately, the you that you know is net worth knowing about.’

Conclusion

I have opted to use the personality trait and leadership style assessments to create my action plan. This plan will be an evergreen document that I will refer to daily to improve my leadership style. I feel confident now because I have developed a plan for the desired destination. This plan will not always be comfortable, and it might even change as the year’s pass, but my forward direction is guaranteed as long as I continue to push forward.

References

  1. Hughes, L.R., Ginnett, C.R., Curphy, J.G.(2019). Leadership: enhancing the lessons of experience(9E). New York.
  2. Riggio, E.R.(2009). Are You a Transformational Leader? Psychology Today. Retrieved March 24, 2009, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cutting-edge leadership/200903/are-you-transformational-leader
  3. Kendra, C.(2020). An Overview of the ENFJ Personality Type. Verywellmind. Retrieved April 27, 2020, from https://www.verywellmind.com/enfj-extraverted-intuitive-feeling-judging-2795979
  4. Ismail, K.(2020). What Is Transformational Leadership Theory?.CMS Wire. Retrieved July 15, 2020, from https://www.cmswire.com/leadership/what-is-transformational-leadership-theory/
  5. Bhasin, H. (2019). Transformational leadership explained with examples. Marketing91. Retrieved November 13, 2019, from https://www.marketing91.com/transformational-leadership/
  6. Cyprus, S. (2020). What is a Leadership Assessment?. Wisegeek. Retrieved October 11, 2020, from https://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-leadership-assessment.htm
  7. Romgens, I. (2012). What made Adolf Hitler a charismatic leader? Retrieved October 29, 2012, from http://www.talkinbusiness.nl/2012/10/charismatic-leadership/
  8. Practical psychology. https://practicalpie.com/myers-briggs-type-indicator/ – for personality trait assessment.
  9. Leadership IQ. https://www.leadershipiq.com/blogs/leadershipiq/36533569-quiz-whats-your-leadership-style -for leadership style assessment.
  10. Krell, M. (2015). Academia. Retrieved May 24, 2020, from https://www.academia.edu/12913498/Leadership_Development_Plan