Who Wants to Follow the Leader? Using Personality and Work Value Profiles to Predict Preferences for Charismatic, Ideological, and Pragmatic Styles of Leading

While the “dark” side of charisma has been discussed at length, namely its potential to promote the leader’s own personal power and self-serving interests (e.g., House and Howell 1992; Padilla et al. 2007; Yukl 1999), we focus on its positive, socialized elements in this study.

Importantly, these differences are malleable—a point made by Weber (1924) and more recently Hunter et al. (2011). For example, charismatic leaders can behave pragmatically when solving problems, while ideological leaders may draw on themes of hope and optimism when articulating their values. The CIP model does not suggest leaders fit neatly into three categories. Rather, it suggests that reliable differences across these styles that can be meaningfully studied.

Although a political setting would have also been a suitable context for the present study, the general feedback from our ten CIP experts was that the unique dynamics of a political organization might limit the generalizability of our findings. In contrast, a nonprofit allowed us to depict a more traditional work setting found in many for profit organizations, while also describing an organization with a strong values-based mission that is at the core of ideological leaders’ prescriptive mental models.

Research suggests that individuals’ values, or their beliefs about desirable end states or behaviors that transcend situations and vary in content and intensity (Rokeach 1973; Schwartz 1992; Schwartz and Bilsky 1987, 1990), share systematic relations with their personality traits (see Bilsky and Schwartz 1994). In explanation, Bilsky and Schwartz (1994) argued that people’s personalities and values, although distinct, share similar underlying motivational dynamics such that they likely reciprocally affect one another. That is, our personalities shape and reinforce our values, which, in turn, promote congruent behavioral patterns consistent with our personalities, and so on. Thus, given personality and values are distinct, yet overlapping in nature (i.e., sharing common variance), we generated separate discriminant functions for participants’ personality and work values for the sake of parsimony and conceptual clarity. That is, we felt that separate DFAs for personality and work values would provide cleaner, more interpretable solutions given the variables comprising the functions are more conceptually distinct, respectively.

Case-wise classifications were also examined to determine whether any patterns emerged in misclassified participants based on the personality and work values functions (i.e., whether individuals who were predicted to choose one type of leader often chose a different leader). However, no patterns emerged based on our analysis.