Leadership as Contextualised Personality Traits

Research on leadership styles and behaviors has largely developed independently from
personality research. In this chapter, we show that there is a great deal of overlap between
leadership styles and personality traits. Leadership styles, such as transformational,
charismatic, transactional, instrumental, supportive, ethical, or destructive styles, are defined,
conceptualized, and operationalized in similar ways as personality traits and can thus be
considered contextualized traits. When taking into account the self-other agreement problem,
and as is also evidenced in behavioral genetics studies, leadership styles are strongly related to
personality. Furthermore, leadership styles show similar levels of trait variance, stability,
heritability, and relations with leadership, subordinate, and organizational criteria as
personality traits. Complete contextualization of the six-dimensional HEXACO personality
inventory into a contextualized leadership version – the HEXACO-Lead – resulted in an
instrument that exhibited higher levels of self-other agreement than observed for leadership
styles and slightly stronger relations with leadership styles than found for the HEXACO
personality inventory. Suggestions are offered to further our understanding of age-related and
volitional changes in leadership, the effects of leadership training, person-supervisor fit, and
the role of liking in leadership research using – from personality to leadership –
contextualized leadership traits.