THE SELECTION AND TRAINING OF LEADERS 



481 



Methods of Selecting Leaders 

 Leader Personality and Effective Leadership 



The problem of selecting leaders is one first 

 of all of determining the characteristics of 

 individuals which predict effective perform- 

 ance, or the relatively quick development of 

 ability to give such a performance. It has 

 already been stressed that the personality of 

 the leader is not the only factor in the leader- 

 ship equation, that the characteristics of the 

 leader are important only in relation to the 

 characteristics of the situation. But for any 

 given leadership job or type of job, it is 

 reasonable to suppose that the leader's per- 

 sonality is a major variable in effective 

 leadership. 



The earlier discussion of personal charac- 

 teristics of group members which are rele- 

 vant to group effectiveness points in a gen- 

 eral way to the kinds of characteristics that 

 might be significant in a leader in any situa- 

 tion: his more important needs, particularly 

 as these relate to other people and to being a 

 leader, and his characteristic ways of satisfy- 

 ing these needs or reacting to frustration; 

 his attitudes, values and ideology concerning 

 social relationships, power, authority, or- 

 ganizational goals, etc.; his knowledge and 

 skills relative to technical problems, social 

 relationships and self -understanding. Pos- 

 sibly other characteristics such as age, phy- 

 sique, bearing, social status, and so on, may 

 be important too, since these may not only 

 affect the leader's capacity to satisfy the 

 demands of some situations, but more gen- 

 erally they may influence others' judgments 

 of the probability that he can meet the situa- 

 tion effectively. 



In order to further our understanding of 

 the ways in which such characteristics may 

 be related to leadership in particular situa- 

 tions, it would seem desirable to carry out 

 intensive personality studies of leaders di- 

 rectly in conjunction with studies of their 

 functioning in relation to other group mem- 

 bers, rather than attempt to jump from per- 



sonality studies on the one hand to criteria 

 of leadership effectiveness on the other, as 

 so many past studies have done. A begin- 

 ning in the desired direction has been made 

 by Jennings (56), and more recently, with 

 more powerful personality instruments, by 

 the First National Training Laboratory in 

 Group Development held at Bethel, Maine 

 (27). 



Answers to a number of fundamental ques- 

 tions depend upon comparative investiga- 

 tions of this sort with reference to various 

 types of group situations. To what extent, 

 for example, do different leadership situa- 

 tions call for different personalities in lead- 

 ers? Or, conversely, to what extent do 

 leaders with given personality characteristics 

 perform effectively in different situations? 

 These questions are not necessarily answered 

 by studies reporting different traits in lead- 

 ers in different situations (see Stogdill's sum- 

 mary, 86), the principal reason being that 

 such traits or the measures of them may be 

 determined to a great extent by the situa- 

 tion. Empirical studies of existing groups, 

 involving more effective personality analyses 

 and situational descriptions, would at least 

 provide reasonable hypotheses as to the im- 

 portant relationships involved. These hy- 

 potheses might then be tested by rotating 

 leaders of known characteristics through a 

 series of different situations and determining 

 the effectiveness of their performance. This 

 is an undertaking, incidentally, for which a 

 military organization provides unrivalled op- 

 portunities. 



A related question having possible impli- 

 cations for leadership training might be in- 

 vestigated by a similar approach. To what 

 extent in a given situation may leaders hav- 

 ing different characteristics develop patterns 

 of leader-follower interaction which are dif- 

 ferent in form but equal in overall effective- 

 ness? 



The problem of selecting leaders in a large 

 organization must be thought of not only 

 cross-sectionally, in terms of the different 



