MGMT 8405M Week 2 Trait Critique Example

Chosen as Leader or Better at Leading? A Trait Critique of the Claim That Extraversion Predicts Leadership, Sorting the Supporting Studies by Whether They Measured Who Was Picked or Whose Groups Performed

Student Name

Walden University

MGMT 8405M: Challenging Conventional Leadership and Influence

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Chosen as Leader or Better at Leading? A Trait Critique of the Claim That Extraversion Predicts Leadership, Sorting the Supporting Studies by Whether They Measured Who Was Picked or Whose Groups Performed

The Claim in Its Authors' Words

The claim this critique examines comes from the most cited meta-analysis of personality and leadership. Judge et al. (2002), organizing 222 correlations from 73 samples by the five-factor model, reported that extraversion correlated .31 with leadership and was the most consistent correlate of leadership across settings and criteria. The authors concluded that the trait perspective, once traits are organized properly, receives strong support. The claim is specific and quantitative, which makes it worth testing: extraversion predicts leadership.

A Short History

Trait research has been declared finished before. Stogdill (1948) surveyed more than a hundred studies and found that the traits marking out leaders changed from one situation to the next, and that leadership had to be understood as a relation between persons in a situation. For two decades afterward, much of the field turned to behaviors and contingencies. The revival came partly from better methods for combining studies. Lord et al. (1986), applying validity generalization procedures to older data, found that several traits predicted who others saw as a leader more strongly and more consistently than earlier reviewers had concluded. Judge and colleagues built on that revival.

Studies Sorted by What They Measured

[after]

The table shows a pattern the headline correlation hides. The studies that support the trait claim most strongly measured who emerged as a leader or who was perceived as one, while the evidence on effectiveness is weaker and, in one case, conditional.

Table 1

Supporting and Qualifying Studies by Leadership Criterion

Emergence Is Not Effectiveness

A study of emergence asks whom a group selects or regards as its leader. A study of effectiveness asks whether a group performs better under that person. The two questions can come apart. An extraverted person speaks often and confidently, which makes that person visible and likely to be nominated, but visibility is not the same as producing better results. Judge and colleagues reported that the five traits related more strongly to emergence than to effectiveness. In addition, many effectiveness measures in the pooled studies were ratings by subordinates or superiors, which can themselves be shaped by the same impressions that produce emergence. When effectiveness is measured as a rating, a correlation with extraversion may partly reflect raters' expectations of what leaders look like.

The pizza store study by Grant et al. (2011) is the most direct test in the table, because it used an objective outcome, store profit. Stores led by managers rated high in extraversion earned more when employees were passive and less when employees were proactive. A laboratory study replicated the pattern. If extraversion helps performance only when followers wait to be directed, the general claim that extraversion predicts leadership needs a qualifier the meta-analysis does not supply.

Where the Literature Ends and the Critique Begins

The literature establishes that extraverted people are more likely to be chosen and seen as leaders. That finding is robust and the critique accepts it. The literature does not establish that extraverted leaders make groups perform better in general; the effectiveness evidence is thinner, rests heavily on ratings and includes at least one well-designed study showing the effect reversing. This critique's own contribution is the sorting: reading the supportive evidence by criterion shows that the strong claim is a claim about selection.

The Surviving Claim

What survives is a narrower statement: extraversion predicts who gets picked and seen as the leader, and it may predict group performance in settings where followers are passive. Whether it predicts performance more generally remains open, and objective outcome studies would be needed to settle it.

Why This Matters for the Term

The same distinction, between being credited with leadership and causing results, runs under the claim I am contesting this term, that the identity of the chief executive explains a large share of firm performance. Attribution and effect are easy to confuse wherever leadership is measured through others' perceptions or through outcomes that many forces produce.

Limits

This critique relies on published summaries and one primary study. A fuller version would recode the effectiveness studies in Judge and colleagues' sample by whether their criterion was a rating or an objective result.

References

Grant, A. M., Gino, F., & Hofmann, D. A. (2011). Reversing the extraverted leadership advantage: The role of employee proactivity. Academy of Management Journal, 54(3), 528-550. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2011.61968043

Judge, T. A., Bono, J. E., Ilies, R., & Gerhardt, M. W. (2002). Personality and leadership: A qualitative and quantitative review. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(4), 765-780. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.87.4.765

Lord, R. G., De Vader, C. L., & Alliger, G. M. (1986). A meta-analysis of the relation between personality traits and leadership perceptions: An application of validity generalization procedures. Journal of Applied Psychology, 71(3), 402-410. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.71.3.402

Stogdill, R. M. (1948). Personal factors associated with leadership: A survey of the literature. Journal of Psychology, 25(1), 35-71. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.1948.9917362