ABSTRACT

The connections between individual personality attributes and leadership effectiveness and leader role occupancy, respectively, have been a topic of interest to researchers for over 100 years (e.g., Terman, 1904; Zaccaro, LaPort, & Jose, 2013). Despite this long-standing research tradition, however, there remains considerable ambiguity about the relationship between personality and leadership. Early reviews offered bleak assessments of this relationship (Mann, 1959; Stogdill, 1948). However, later meta-analyses offered a brighter, although still mixed, picture (DeRue, Nahrgang, Wellman, & Humphrey, 2011; Hoffman, Woehr, Maldagen-Youngjohn, & Lyons, 2011; Judge, Bono, Ilies, & Gerhart, 2002; Judge, Colbert, & Ilies, 2004; Lord, De Vader, & Alliger, 1986). While corrected correlations tended to be higher than those observed in prior studies, they were still relatively modest, with a fair degree of variability across studies.