Personality and leadership: A qualitative and quantitative review.
2002/01/01 by Timothy A. Judge, Joyce E. Bono, Remus Ilies +2 · 3,007 citations
Mathematics · Psychology · #Agreeableness #Big Five personality traits #Conscientiousness #Creativity in Education and Neuroscience #Emotional Intelligence and Performance #Extraversion and introversion #Hierarchical structure of the Big Five #Leadership style #Mathematics #Neuroticism #Openness to experience #Personality #Personality Traits and Psychology #Perspective (graphical) #Psychology #Social psychology #Trait #Trait theory
paper · doi:10.1037/0021-9010.87.4.765
published in Journal of Applied Psychology 87(4), 765-780 (American Psychological Association)
openalex publication_date 2002/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Abstract
This article provides a qualitative review of the trait perspective in leadership research, followed by a meta-analysis. The authors used the five-factor model as an organizing framework and meta-analyzed 222 correlations from 73 samples. Overall, the correlations with leadership were Neuroticism = -.24, Extraversion = .31, Openness to Experience = .24, Agreeableness = .08, and Conscientiousness = .28. Results indicated that the relations of Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to Experience, and Conscientiousness with leadership generalized in that more than 90% of the individual correlations were greater than 0. Extraversion was the most consistent correlate of leadership across study settings and leadership criteria (leader emergence and leadership effectiveness). Overall, the five-factor model had a multiple correlation of .48 with leadership, indicating strong support for the leader trait perspective when traits are organized according to the five-factor model.
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