The six traits of great leadership

By Pradeep Chakravarthy

Research shows that a great leader exudes charisma, ensures inspirational and intellectual stimulation, pays individual attention to the people below him and does not manage by exception or adopt a laissez-faire leadership.

Close your eyes and recall a time when you worked with a leader you rank among the best in your life. The chances are that you will think of them as leaders because they had charisma, inspirational and intellectual stimulation, individualised consideration, contingent rewards, and did not manage by exception or adopt a laissez-faire leadership.

The work of Bernard M Bass and Bruce J Avolio of the Center for Leadership Studies at the School of Management in State University of New York Birmingham deserves special mention. The duo's seminal model on leadership factors-enlisted in their work Improving Organizational Effectiveness Through Transformational Leadership-has since been used by many researchers to either drill deeper or aim for a higher abstraction.

This article summarises the evidence of a new set of studies done on the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire that Bass and Avolio created to measure the six factors that help describe a person's leadership style. Some key points, the definitions of the components of The Full Range Leadership Model the authors described are important. The definitions are:

Charisma

Provides followers with a clear sense of purpose that is energising, role model for ethical conduct and builds identification with the leader and his/her articulated views

Intellectual stimulation

Gets followers to question the tried and tested ways of solving problems and encourages them to question the methods they use to improve upon them

Individual attention

Focus on understanding the individualised needs of the followers and works continuously to get them to develop to their full potential

Contingent reward

Clarifies what is expected from followers and what they will get if they meet expected levels of performance

Active management

Focus on monitoring task execution for any problems that may arise and correcting those problems to maintain current performance levels

Avoidant leadership

Tends to react only after problems have become serious to take corrective action and often avoids making any decision at all. This has some sub factors. The authors found that the best leaders seemed to have a mix of both transactional and transformational leadership.



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