[MUSIC] So, did you write something down when you were thinking about the leader that you admired relating to capable, knowledgable, a very nice person, something in that direction? Is that what you wrote? Well, in that case, you have already been looking through the perspective, through the glasses of trait theories. Trait perspectives. Understanding leadership. So what we really want to understand in using these theories of leadership is, why are some people leaders and why are others not? And second of all, what people are more or less effective in the process of leadership in the process of influencing others towards a shared objective? So the trait theories basically say, we want to look at the characteristics of people? This can be very basic characteristic. Is the person a man or a woman? Is this person maybe early 50s or very young? Is it something about how tall the person is? Or, I don't know what? And these were really the first set of dimensions about which people started analyzing leadership. They thought, something about these people is special. There is something about the characteristics of these people that make them leaders, that make them stand out. More recently, especially also since there was not a lot of findings based on only these demographic characteristics, people started to look at what is called personality traits. So personality traits are those characteristics of a person that are really relatively stable. They don't change so much over time. And also, they are very consistent across situations. And it is here that trait theory really have provided quite a bit of insight in why some people are leaders and others are not, and why some are more effective than others. And I want to give you three examples of these personality traits. The first is conscientiousness. So people who are very conscientious are people who are very careful, very diligent, very structured, very disciplined, very organized. And in fact, being very conscientious has been associated with being perceived as a leader. So, if you exhibit these traits, this type of stable behavior, then people are more likely to see you as a leader than when you are less organized, less disciplined, and less structured in your behavior. The second personality trait is extroversion. And this is the type of trait describing whether people are sociable, outgoing, energetic. And the more extrovert you are, the higher you are in terms of being energized by working with other people, by being outgoing, talkative. And this trait, in fact, has also been associated with being perceived as a leader. So conscientiousness and extroversion. People that are high on these traits that show a lot of the behaviors associated with this underlying personality characteristic, in fact, are more likely to be seen as leaders in their organizations. Second perspective is, what makes people more effective in terms of the performance of groups or organizations that our leaders are leading? And here is where a third personality trait comes in, which is called, agreeableness. So, people who are highly agreeable are the type of people who are just nice, cooperative, warm, like to be with people, care for people, and like to help them. If you remember from last week where we talked about altruistic motivation. So, people like to do things because they help others. They are motivated because they want to contribute something outside of themselves. This is also related to the perspective of agreeableness, as we see it here. And in fact, there's quite a bit of research showing that people who are higher on this trait of agreeableness, in fact, help their groups and their organizations they are leading to perform better. So what we see here is a set of three personality characteristics that say something about leadership. That are associated with whether people perceive you as a leader or not. And how effective you are in influencing the common goal of the group you are leading, which we said is a key dimension of the process of leadership. [MUSIC]