Personality and Leadership: Looking Back, Looking Ahead

Scholarly and practical interest in the traits and characteristics of effective leaders is long-standing and broad ranging. This chapter briefly summarizes the empirical literature with a focus on both traits that have been linked to leadership in the past (i.e., Big Five traits, self-monitoring), and traits that deserve more attention in the future as predictors of leadership success and failure (i.e., traits related to resiliency, proactivity, adaptability, integrity). In an effort to stimulate future research, the authors advocate for a more complex approach to the study of personality and leadership, including examination of nonlinear associations, trait profiles, and factors that enhance or constrain the personality–leadership association