9: Personality Drives Leaders' Decision-making

How do you describe your personality? Courageous? Stubborn? Confident? Extroverted? Flamboyant and volatile? Steady and reserved? What is personality, exactly? Where does your personality come from? How do personality traits influence leaders' decision-making? This chapter focuses on those inquiries.

Personality is a pattern of human behavior. Personality is expressed through a pattern of behavior over time and functions as a predictor of a person's decisions. There are three personality features that most scientists have agreed upon. First, personality is stable. Although some people's personality traits are more malleable than others', personality does not change from moment to moment, unlike emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. As a result, knowing someone's personality allows us to predict their decisions. Second, personalities are individually different. It is part of the explanation for why each person behaves somewhat differently in a given context, and we can use personality as a guide to identify distinct personality types among groups of people (Gerlach et al., 2018). Third, personality is multicomponent. The way to organize and arrange enduring characteristics, behaviors, motives, thoughts, and emotions is called personality structure. For example, one prominent model of personality structure is the five-factor model, also known as the Big Five. This model posits that personality can be characterized across five broad dimensions: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. These traits are often seen as emotional–motivational dispositional traits triggered by particular stimuli. We will discuss it in more detail shortly.