TRAIT, SKILLS AND STYLE THEORY OF MANAGEMENT

Trait, Skills and Style Theory of Management: Strengths and Weaknesses

Trait, Skills and Style Theory of Management: Strengths and Weaknesses

Trait Theory

Trait theory represents researchers' earliest attempts to investigate leadership. Around the turn of the twentieth century, researchers sought to identify traits that effective leaders possessed by examining leaders who had achieved a level of greatness. These preliminary attempts to identify traits of leaders focused on well-known historical figures who were men, which is why this theory is often called the “great man” approach.

Bogotch (2005) mentions early proponents of the classic trait perspective suggested that certain individuals have special innate characteristics or qualities that make them leaders and it is these qualities that differentiate them from non-leaders. Fundamental to this theory was the idea that some people are born with traits that make them natural leaders. Influenced by the interest in mental testing and the functionalism that characterized the time (Bogotch, 2005), psychologists began to correlate specific individual differences, in particular intelligence and mental ability, with performance in leadership positions.

An ambiguous term, trait theory has been used to refer to personality, temperaments, dispositions, and abilities, as well as to physical and demographic attributes. One of the first systematic attempts to review trait leadership research was conducted by Ralph Stogdill. This seminal research study analyzed over one hundred trait studies that took place over a period of four decades. His results showed that a person who holds a position of leadership surpasses the average member of the group in several ways, including intelligence, scholarship, dependability, and sociability (Bogotch, 2005). Though Stogdill determined that there was indeed a high consistency in the relationship between intelligence and being a leader, he concluded that it is difficult to isolate a set of traits that are characteristic of leadership without factoring situational effects into the equation. A leader in some situations might not be a leader in other situations. Several researchers during this era substantiated this point.

Skills Theory

Unlike trait theory, the skill theory posits that leadership is about behaviour first, skills second. Good leaders are followed chiefly because people trust and respect them, rather than the skills they possess (Yukl, 2002). Leadership is different to management. Management relies more on planning, organisational and communications skills. Leadership relies on management skills too, but more so on qualities such as integrity, honesty, humility, courage, commitment, sincerity, passion, confidence, positivity, wisdom, determination, ...