As an Organizational Leadership major, I have read this textbook (Northouse, 2016) three times (in varying editions) and I’m always fascinated when reading about the trait approach to understanding leadership. I find it interesting that the trait approach, which “emphasizes that having a leader with a certain set of traits is crucial having effective leadership” (Northouse, 2016), is inherently flawed for several reasons and overly basic, but still probably the first way we understand leadership as adolescents and young adults. This may be for several reasons, but mostly because absent any experience with leadership, we resort to emulating the traits of those we admire.
Many of us have experienced this situation when we were given our first bit of authority: A conflict arises with one of our new subordinates, and our first reaction is to put on our best leader performance, based on some leader whose traits we have admired in the past (dominance, masculinity, self-confidence). The conflict escalates and we don’t understand why our “leadership” wasn’t effective. As we grow as leaders, we understand that leadership is much more complex that acting the part of a leader.
This was my first experience with leadership in the military. In about 15 months, I had worked myself all the way to E-4 (very junior) and was in charge of tasking several people. One day I had a conflict with one member with a bad attitude, and I found myself embodying traits that I had witnessed in my previous supervisors, because that was all the experience I had.
The trait approach to understanding leadership is simplistic to a fault. If a leader attempts to use a predetermined set of traits when dealing with every subordinate or every leadership situation, he will fail. A leader must also focus on followers and the process of leadership. The trait approach’s main utility is in describing the traits that help followers identify an individual as a leader.
References:
Northouse, P.G. (2016). Leadership: theory and practice (7th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.