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2. Leadership theories
2.1 Traits theory
Traits theory or theory of leader’s qualities is the earliest approach to the study and
explanation of leadership. The early researchers tried to reveal the qualities that distinguish
“great people” from masses.
The researchers believed that leaders had a certain unique set of quite stable and
unchanging with time qualities distinguishing them from non-leaders. Proceeding from this
approach, scientists were trying to determine leader’s qualities, to learn measuring them and use
to detect potential leaders. This approach was based on the belief that one was born a leader, not
became it.
In this direction they conducted hundreds of experiments generating an extremely long list
of traits of the determined leader’s qualities. R. Stogdill in 1948 and R. Mann in 1959 tried to
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summarize and group all the qualities found earlier. Thus, Stogdill came to the conclusion that a
leader is characterized by mainly five qualities:
- mind or intellectual abilities;
- dominance or prevailing over others;
- self-confidence;
- activeness and vitality;
- competence.
Nevertheless, these five qualities did not explain the arising of a leader. Many people with
these traits remained followers. Mann faced a similar disappointment. Among the seven traits
discovered by him, intellect was the best predictor of its owner’s being a leader. But the practice
did not confirm it. Despite of this, the study of leader’s qualities went on up to the middle of 80-
ies. The most interesting result was obtained by a well-known American consultant W. Bennis
who studied 90 successful leaders and determined the following groups of leader’s qualities:
- control of attention, or the ability to present the essence of a result, aim, or actions in such a
way that it was attractive to the followers;
- control of trust or the ability of building one’s activity with such persistence and
consistency that would make it possible to obtain the complete trust of employees;
- self-control or ability to know and recognize one’s strong and weak sides so well that for
strengthening of weak sides to be able to skillfully draw other resources including those of
other people.
The study that followed has led to distinguishing four groups of leader’s traits:
physiological, psychological or emotional, mental or intellectual, and personal business skills.
To physiological are also related such traits as height, weight, complexion or figure,
appearance or presentability, vigor, and general state of health. Of course, there may exist the
connection between the presence of these qualities and leadership, but to be physically taller and
bigger than an average person in a group yet doesn’t give any right of being its leader. The
example of many people confirms the fact that individuals with deviation to a lesser side can
grow to the size of very influential figures.
Psychological qualities, such as bravery, independence, imitativeness, honesty,
workability, and so on are manifested in practice mainly through a person’s character. The study
of their relation to leadership has brought to compilation of a very long list of these traits. Most
of them still haven’t got confirmation of their relation to leadership.
The study of mental qualities and their connection with leadership was undertaken by
many scientists and their results coincide in general with the fact that the level of these traits in
leaders is higher than in non-leaders. This is probably the result of the fact that a leader’s success
depend for a larger part on his/her abilities and the skill of problem-solving and taking correct
decisions. Nevertheless, subsequent researches showed that the correlation between these traits
and leadership is considerably small. Thus, if the mean intellectual level of the followers is not
high enough, being too clever means for a leader to come across many problems.
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Personal business qualities have mostly the character of acquired and developed by a
leader skills in performing his/her functions.
Their importance for success increase with the level of organizational hierarchy. But an
exact measuring them is complicated. It still hasn’t been proved that these qualities are crucial
for effective leadership. Thus, business qualities making someone a leader in a commercial bank
are unlikely to be of any use for leadership in a research laboratory or in theatre.
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