Followers' personality and leadership.

The study presented in this article investigates how the personality of subordinates is related to leadership, an area largely neglected in prior research. Subordinates (n = 289) rated their immediate superior on transformational, transactional, and passive-avoidant leadership measured by the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) and completed the NEO-FFI, with the five traits neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. The results revealed that subordinates' personality (n = 289) was only moderately associated with leadership ratings. Links were found between ratings of transformational leadership and subordinates' level of neuroticism and agreeableness. Furthermore, ratings of passive-avoidant leadership were associated with subordinates' level of agreeableness and openness.

Keywords: subordinates' personality; transformational leadership; transactional leadership; passive-avoidant leadership; NEO-FFI; MLQ; structural equation modeling; leadership ratings; followers' personality

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Within both leadership research and practice, the focus is often on the leader as someone having unilateral influence on subordinates. Followers' characteristics are typically posited as a dependent variable, affected by the leader's traits, behavior, and power bases (Dvir & Shamir, 2003; Yukl, 1998). So far, the majority of the leadership literature has neglected the role of subordinates' characteristics in defining and shaping leaders' behavior (Ehrhart & Klein, 2001; Judge & Bono, 2001).

In the past decades, a line of leadership research has focused on transformational leadership and suggested this leadership style to be responsible for "performance beyond expectations" (Bass, 1985). Transformational leadership consists of idealized influence, where leaders are role models with a vision; inspirational motivation, which builds identification with the leader and provides a purpose for followers; intellectual stimulation, which implies questioning old assumptions; and individual consideration of followers' needs. Transformational leadership has been consistently linked to positive outcomes, such as satisfaction, motivation, and effectiveness (Hater & Bass, 1988; Hetland & Sandal, 2003). This leadership behavior is distinguished from the more traditional, transactional leadership that mainly entails relationships based on exchange of rewards between leader and subordinate. A third form, passive-avoidant leadership, is defined as avoiding making decisions at all or reacting only after problems have become serious. Although the three leadership styles are currently frequently used in research, the theory and measurement of these styles have also been criticized (Yukl, 1999).

Leadership literature has linked leadership behavior and attitude to followership, for instance, by focusing on how leaders' behavior affects motivation and satisfaction among subordinates. Many leadership theories and models have suggested how leaders affect and change followers through different types of influence processes (Yukl, 1998). Some theories, such as leader-member exchange theory, have specifically emphasized the dyadic aspect developing between a leader and a subordinate but have failed to investigate followers' characteristics in further detail. Thus, although an extensive literature has addressed the implications of leadership style for organizational outcomes, there has been a lack of studies examining followers' personality characteristics as indicators of differences in leadership (Dvir & Shamir, 2003; Meindl, 1995). Studies by Hautala (2005) and Roush (1992) are among the few exceptions to this leader-centered trend. However, these authors use the category-based Myers-Briggs type indicator in their investigation of followers' personality, and Hautala only addressed one leadership style, transformational leadership, in her article. Thus, the focus of the study presented in this article is to investigate the relationship between the dimensional five-factor structure of personality and three leadership styles.

An assumption underlying the study is that the personality characteristics of subordinates may be related to leadership ratings basically through two mechanisms. First, as pointed out by several investigators (Ehrhart & Klein, 2001; Klein & House, 1995), subordinates may form different relationships with their leaders based on their personalities. Second, stable individual differences in perceptual orientation may be related to subjective evaluations of leadership (Zellars & Perrewe, 2001).

The five-factor model of personality, a widely recognized taxonomy of personality dimensions, will be used as a framework to investigate individual differences in the article. This five-dimensional model with its measure has proven to be a reliable and valid measure of personality and is among the most robust (Costa & McCrae, 1985, 1992). According to this model, neuroticism, extraversion, openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness are the five central dimensions of personality. These traits have been linked to differences in job performance and job satisfaction (Mount, Barrick, & Stewart, 1998; Salgado, 1998; Tett, 1991).

Transformational leadership has been linked to leader traits and behaviors in several studies (Atwater & Yammarino, 1993; Hetland & Sandal, 2003; Judge & Bono, 2001). Yet, researchers taking on a more follower-centered approach emphasize that inspiration resides not in the leader or in the follower but in the relationship between a leader with these characteristics, a follower who is open to such characteristics, and the environment necessary for the development of such a relationship (Klein & House, 1995).

Burns (1978) conceived transforming leadership as a dynamic, reciprocal process in which both leaders and followers are transformed by each other. In this connection, characteristics in subordinates could thus facilitate or impede the occurrence of transformational leadership as well as other leadership styles.

Dvir and Shamir (2003) pointed out that when encountering followers with high levels of social activity, initiative, and self-esteem, leaders will be more encouraged to activate a transformational style because they will perceive their followers as having the appropriate characteristics for such leadership. This would suggest that attributes such as high levels of extraversion and conscientiousness and low levels of neuroticism from the five-factor model are important subordinate characteristics. A literature review has revealed that the most central follower characteristics are related to their developmental level within the domains of motivation, morality, and empowerment (Dvir & Shamir, 2003). Shamir and Howell (1999) distinguished between followers with an instrumental orientation to work, who view their work primarily as a means for obtaining extrinsic rewards, and expressively oriented followers, who expect their work to provide opportunities for self-expression. They assumed that the latter group would be most suitable for transformational leadership. Although instrumentality is one aspect of conscientiousness in the five-factor model (Musson, Sandal, & Helmreich, 2004), conscientiousness has been identified in meta-analyses as a predictor of job performance across occupations and organizations (Judge, Heller, & Mount, 2002; Salgado, 1998). We therefore suggest that conscientiousness could be linked to transactional leadership, both involving instrumentality, through the contingent reward component, found to be at the interface of transactional and transformational leadership (Tejeda, Scandura, & Pillai, 2001). Furthermore, conscientiousness could imply a positive attitude to work and the leader, suggesting a relation to transformational leadership.

Emphasis on self-expression is also likely to be associated with subordinates' level of openness to experience, referring to attributes such as critical-independent thinking (Ferguson & Patterson, 1998). Such attributes among subordinates may particularly encourage the leader to articulate new ideas and to stimulate rethinking of old ways of doing things, a central feature of transformational leadership (Bass, 1990). Furthermore, there is a possibility that the trait of openness and reflection on behalf of the follower could be related to a lower degree of leader passiveness.

According to the principle of complementarity, interpersonal behavior invites a particular class of responses along two dimensions, affiliation, from friendliness to hostility, and control, from dominance to submission. This theory postulates that along the affiliation dimension, friendliness invites friendliness and hostility invites hostility (Dryer & Horowitz, 1997). In relation to the framework of the five-factor model, this would suggest that followers characterized by high levels of agreeableness, conceptually related to friendliness and warmth (Goldberg, 1992; John, 1990), and extroversion, also related to warmth (Costa, McCrae, & Dye, 1991), would stimulate the emergence of transformational leadership and lead to lower levels of passive-avoidant leadership. Neuroticism in subordinates, implying hostility, could impede the occurrence of a transformational relationship and possibly increase passive-avoidant leadership as it could invite a hostile response in the leader.

Lord and Maher (1991) pointed out that cognitive strategies and categories used by followers could be important in understanding ratings of leadership. In line with this, studies have consistently shown that perceptions account for a significant amount of variance in leadership ratings (Lord, Brown, & Freiberg, 1999). Especially relevant to this is neuroticism.

The trait of neuroticism (vs. emotional stability) is centrally defined as individual differences in the tendency to experience negative emotional states (Costa & McCrae, 1987). Neuroticism is conceptually similar to negative affectivity as described by Watson and Pennebaker (1989). There is a fairly consistent body of literature suggesting that subordinates with high negative affectivity dispositions react to environmental conditions and themselves with a generalized negative cognitive set that produces a negative interpretation of a wide range of phenomena (Munz, Huelsman, Konold, & McKinney, 1996; Williams, Gavin, & Williams, 1996). Due to the tendency of individuals high on neuroticism to view the world through a negative lens, it is expected that this trait is associated with negative descriptions of the leader (Chen & Spector, 1991; Furnham, 1992; Schaubroeck, Ganster, & Fox, 1992).

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