ABSTRACT
Early attempts to understand leadership suggested that leaders were those people who had the ‘right stuff’ in terms of personality traits. When studies were unable to identify what these traits were, researchers abandoned the trait approach for a situational one. In this view, the situation determines who will be a leader. Just as was the case for the trait approach, this view also came to be seen as somewhat simplistic and researchers began to take an interactionist approach, in which person and situation were said to act in conjunction.
