Assessing Leadership Potential with a Biographical Measure of Personality Traits

Abstract

The aim of this study was to demonstrate the feasibility of biographical inventories free of the limitations common to many current biographical measures by constructing and validating an inventory composed of homogeneous scales, with item content that is factual and fair, to assess personality traits predictive of leadership. The experimental inventory, with tentative scales for Dominance, Emotional Stability, Need for Achievement, Self-Confidence, and Sociability, was administered to incoming midshipmen at the US Naval Academy and item analyzed. The validity of the final scales was appraised against subsequent peer ratings of the traits and of leadership shortly after entering the Academy; military performance grades, and midshipman rank and leadership position at the Academy; and recommendations for promotion after graduating and serving as an officer. The Sociability, Dominance, and Need for Achievement scales demonstrated convergent and discriminant validity, and all of the scales except Self-Confidence correlated with the leadership criteria. The Sociability scale's consistent correlations with several of the leadership criteria, including a nontrivial correlation (r = 0.28) with the leadership peer rating, implies that this measure may be useful in assessing leadership potential.

Observed Leadership Potential of Personnel in a Team Setting: Big Five traits and proximal factors as predictors

“…Several of the response scales parallel those used in the biodata instrument of LaHuis, Martin, and Avis (2005) and are similar to a format presented by Hough and Paullin. In addition, several items included response scales that were more objective in referring to specific past actions that are potentially verifiable (see Stricker & Rock, 1998). In this way, they were consistent with the format advocated by Mael (1994) and Mumford and Owens (1987).…”

Childhood general cognitive ability predicts leadership role occupancy across life: Evidence from 17,000 cohort study participants

“…Arvey et al, 2006;Judge, Bono, Ilies, & Gerhardt, 2002;Mumford, O'Conner, Clifton, Connelly, & Zaccaro, 1993). To capture leadership experience participants have been asked to recall the number of specific leadership positions they have held including whether they have captained sports teams or held formal officer roles in clubs or organizations or acted as class leaders in high school (Day, Sin, & Chen, 2004, Mumford et al, 1993Stricker & Rock, 1998). Our leadership role occupancy variable was a binary indicator of whether the cohort member was an employee or a manager at the time of being interviewed.…”

Characteristics of Valid Biographical Items

“…The factors' labels and content (Trent, 1993) were used to define the content areas, with only minor changes for clarity (e.g., the School Achievement factor was relabeled School Involvement). Raters classified the items into one of the six content areas (or an "other" category), using a sorting procedure (Stricker & Rock, 1998). Each item's consensus classification (the one chosen by at least two raters) was used in the analysis.…”