Imagine what you think of is a great leader. What do they like? What kind of person are they? What kind of personality do they have? Your personality consists of your traits that are stable across time and situation. Traits themselves are habitual patterns of behavior, thought, and emotion. Personality is important to leadership because these are the behaviors you will engage across situations. This means your personality will be your default response to different kinds of crises and challenges. If you're extroverted, you will automatically start interacting with people, whereas if you are introverted, you might recede and start contemplating. As we will talk about later, you need to adapt your leadership style to your personality. However, we need to be careful at the same time not to overestimate the importance of personality. As a leader, you do not want to assume that a fellows behavior is caused by the personality when it was really the circumstances. You have to make the right attribution. Attribution are the causal explanations that we make about behavior. Psychologists talk about external attributions where the cause is the situation, and internal attributions where the cause is the person. One major pitfall is the actor observer bias. Humans in general tend to assume that behavior is caused by internal factors, even if they are truly external. For example, if a worker is late to work, people are more likely to assume that they're just not very organized than that there was say traffic. To protect yourself against this bias, consider the three factors of attributions. These are consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency. If that worker is late and no one else is, then is more likely their personality than the situation. That is the consensus factor. Do others behave in the same way? If the worker is late, even to other events or parties, then that is likely the personality, that is distinctiveness. Does this person act the same way across different situations? Finally, if they are always late to work, then that is consistency. Does this person act this way in other instances of the same situation? Make sure all three are true before making an assumption about a worker's personality. If you make assumptions about their personality and who they are, you'll have a harder time adapting your leadership style to who they actually are. That will make leadership particularly challenging. A final thought on this. We do not just make bias attribution about others. We also make them about ourselves. In particularly, we tend to assign internal attributions to our own successes, and external attributions to our failures. That as humans tend to take credit for our successes, but blame our failures on the circumstances. As a leader, you need to be mindful of this bias. Using the three factories of attribution can be a guard to protect you against this bias as well. It can be challenging to talk about personality exactly because people find this topic so interesting. Many different systems of personality have been created to understand and categorize people. However, psychologists have found that one system in particular is the most consistent and has the strongest evidence. This system is called the Big Five, because there are five broad traits that included many different kinds of human behavior. These traits are extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness to experience, and neuroticism. Remember, these are traits, not types. So one person will be high or low on one or all of these. There are no extroverts in the sense of a type of person, so much as people who are more or less extroverted. To define each of these briefly. People who are extroverted tend to be sociable, active, and find it easy to express the positive emotions. They also tend to be assertive and socially domineering. People who are conscientious tend to be dependable, productive, and ambitious. They are loyal and achievement oriented. People who are agreeable tend to be trusting, caring, and gentle. They're friendly and easy to get along with. At the same time, they might struggle to speak up or enforce their personal boundaries. People who are open to experience tend to be imaginative, independent, and kind of eccentric. They often like trying different things and exploring. People who are emotionally stable are not easily threatened. They do not worry much nor do they often feel insecure. Sometimes this personality trait is called neuroticism, and that describes people who are those things. Last [INAUDIBLE] theory added honesty and humility as a single additional personality trait. People who have this trait tend to be modest, sincere, and strive to be fair. Using these traits, what do you think is your personality? There are many personal tests online if you're curious. In the readings, you will learn about the outcomes of personality and how it changes across life. You will also learn about values, the things that are important to people, and how those can shape your leadership ability. Which are the personality traits do you think are most important for leadership? We'll talk more about that in the next section.
