1. 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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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.

6. 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?

7. 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

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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

12. Questions?