OBNotes.hlp and OBNotes.htm by Wilf Ratzburg. ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR. A TRAIT APPROACH TO LEADERSHIP

.	Ask people what good leadership is, and it's quite likely you will get a response that suggests good leadership can somehow be defined in terms of traits or characteristics. Similarly, if one were to ask people to design an experiment aimed at defining good leadership, it's likely the response will be an attempt to isolate the characteristics of leaders of organizations deemed to be successful (by whatever terms that success is measured). This is exactly what the initial, formal research into leadership was all about. There was a sense among researchers that some critical leadership traits could be isolated. There was also a feeling that people with such traits could then be recruited, selected, and installed into leadership positions.
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.	The problem with the trait approach lies in the fact that almost as many traits as studies undertaken were identified. After several years of such research, it became apparent that no such traits could be identified. Although some traits were identified in a considerable number of studies, the results were generally inconclusive. Researchers were further confounded by questions about how to find commonality or generalizability from an examination of the traits of leaders as diverse as Stalin, Hitler, Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Churchill, Mother Theresa, Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher. Do these leaders have any trait in common? Is this a trait all leaders must possess?
Although there was little consistency in the results of the various trait studies, some traits did appear more frequently than others:	technical skill friendliness task motivation application to task group task supportiveness social skill emotional control administrative skill general charisma intelligence