Читать книгу The EQ Leader - Stein Steven J. - Страница 14

One of the breakthroughs in our understanding of leadership in an academic sense came in a review paper by psychologist Robert Lord and his colleagues at the University of Akron back in 1986.24 While looking at the (then) controversial area in organizational psychology around the usefulness of personality traits in leadership, he found an important distinction. Most organizational psychologists at the time had written off the importance of personality in leadership. This was based on a few poorly designed studies that focused on the importance of IQ in leadership by mainly looking at leader performance, and mostly in academic settings. Of course, you don't need to be an organizational psychologist to realize that personality plays a big part in leadership – if not in leadership performance, at least in leadership selection. For example, it would be hard to imagine a political election in which the personality of the candidates doesn't come into play.

Although it may seem intuitive, this was a big realization. How we select leaders is completely different from how we evaluate their performance. So Kaiser and his group reformulated our understanding of leadership using this distinction and classified studies into two groups: one group of studies that focused on how a leader is seen by others and another group that focused on the effectiveness of the groups that were being led. Basically, this differentiated the groups into leaders who were “looking good” versus those who were “doing good.” Just think about how we select leaders, whether it's CEOs or politicians. We generally go by how they present themselves. Another way to look at it is that the first group of studies focused on the individual leader and the second group looked at how the team, group, or organization was functioning.