Rachel L. Turner, Cara C. Campos, Douglas E. Colman, Tera D. Letzring Do You Have the Traits of a Leader? An Analysis of the Big Five Personality Traits and Leadership Experience Rachel L. Turner, Cara C. Campos, Douglas E. Colman, Tera D. Letzring

Our Purpose Research indicates some Big Five personality traits are related to leadership style Extraversion, conscientiousness, openness, neuroticism Little to no research has examined the relationships between: Personality traits Having leadership experience Amount of time in leadership positions

Our Purpose Present study examined the relationship between personality traits and leadership experience Hypothesis: Extraversion, conscientiousness, and openness would predict having leadership experience and duration (in months) No specific predictions for neuroticism and agreeableness

Method Participants Recruited from Idaho State University and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk N = 370; Mage = 31.82, SDage = 12.12 Primarily female (69%) Mostly European American (84%) 147 were excluded for not having the necessary measures completed

Leadership Experience? Method Leadership Experience? No How long? Yes Measures Big Five Inventory (John, Naumann, & Soto, 2008) General demographic questionnaire Work experience questions This logic was used to ask participants who indicated that they had leadership experience (with a yes/no response option) to estimate the number of months of such experience.

Leadership Experience? Method Leadership Experience? Statistical procedures Stage 1: Leadership Experience (Yes vs. No) Big Five personality traits Used logistic regression Stage 2: Months of Leadership Experience Included only those who indicated “Yes” to having leadership experience # of months was log transformed to meet the assumption of normality Used OLS regression No Yes How long?

Results: Stage 1 Controlling for age, gender, and ethnic grouping Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Conscientiousness were NOT significantly predictive of leadership experience Agreeableness and Openness were significantly predictive of leadership experience Agreeableness = probability of having leadership experience Openness = probability of having leadership experience

Results: Stage 2 None of the Big Five traits were significantly predictive of duration of time in a leadership role

Discussion Positive relation between Openness and probability of having leadership experience Openness is related to divergent thinking and creativity Negative relation between Agreeableness and probability of having leadership experience Agreeableness is related to cooperativeness, sensitivity, and avoidance of inter-personal conflict divergent thinking and creativity are sought after characteristics Agreeableness is positive, but it may not promote growth and innovation

Discussion Scores on the Big Five have little relation with duration of leadership experience Future research Further explore the role of personality in each domain Seek to understand the disconnect between acquiring leadership experience vs. maintaining a position in that role

Conclusions The Big Five personality traits seem to play a role in acquiring leadership positions… …but are not indicative of how long one may hold a leadership position

Questions?