Re-Envisioning a Hierarchy of Leadership Behaviours Using Insights from the Psychological Literature on Personality Traits

Abstract

The current body of research on leadership styles is plagued with the problem of a bewildering number of styles that overlap conceptually and empirically, and whose dimensionality is contested. In this paper, we use analogical reasoning to argue that recommendations based on the personality psychology literature could be used to overcome these and related problems to substantially advance the literature on leadership styles. We argue that scholarly understanding of leadership styles needs to be redeveloped by theoretically identifying root behaviours and then seeing how they aggregate into higher-level dimensions and meta-categories. We offer a roadmap that will help facilitate such progress and enable future research to cumulate into a more comprehensive, coherent, and empirically justifiable hierarchical model of leadership behaviours. We also discuss how personality research raises a variety of other interesting analogous questions about leadership behaviours, including how to incorporate situational influences and whether patterns of characteristic leader behaviours develop over time.