The Relationship Between Leadership Style and Personality Traits

Mohammad Nasir Zahor (18827)

Emran Hamkar ( )

Environmental Designs International (EDI)

Question 01:

''At the senior management level, you get hired for competence. You get fired for personality.'' In your opinion, is this statement true or false? And how does it relate to Barry Carver and his current leadership style?

Answer 01:

We believe this statement is true. Since attitude plays a crucial part in dealing with people, it can augment or undermine one's people skills. Once a person gets to a high rank management position, it is absolutely necessary or obligatory to get followers on board to carry out the overall mission of the organization.

If the senior leadership level is painfully suffering from personality problems, it is very much difficult to get the employees headed in the same direction and accomplish the tasks necessary to bring success and prosperity to the organization.

Despite the fact that Carver is highly skilled, his personality helped him become a manager at EDI. Carver's intimidating communication style gave birth to serious problems and hindered his capability to gain the expected outcomes.

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It doesn't matter whether he has been hired due to his intellect or past experience making him a good fit for his role but his authoritarian, hard-driving, and aggressively bossy style, is clashing in a social culture. In a sound social culture happiness and comradeship are always preferable, however Carver's current communication style is not acceptable, nor working out by any means. We should care of everyone we come in contact with as an individual relationship or partnership.

These relationships, should be based on great regard for dignity, mutual respect and empathy regardless of the fact that whether they are with our subordinate, peers or superiors. Thus, we say, we reap what we sow. Currently, Barry is a task-oriented autocratic leader, who is very less concerned about the people working under his subordination. This may consequently affect both his current job as well as hamper his consideration for the position of senior management.

In the case, it is quite clear that EDI takes into consideration personality seriously. Nevertheless, Barry's leadership style is shedding tons of negative impacts on his employees and peers, which as a result caused to raise so many complaints about his attitude and poor performance review. Therefore, we suggest that, Barry strongly needs to collaborate with his peers, subordinates, federal regulatory agencies, and be more people-oriented in order to achieve the desired results.

Question 02:

Identify the behavior described in this case that were damaging to Barry Carver's work relationships. Why would a manager behave this way? What negative consequences did these behaviors have on his peers and subordinates?

Answer 02:

Borderline personality disorder (BPD), also known as emotionally unstable personality disorder: According to this theory, Barry is suffering from being emotionally unstable as he transfers on his anger and frustration on his peers and subordinates.

Perpetual jerk - You will have a belief that people work for you If you're a jerk and not a true leader. If you compare this with what the best bosses do, you will find that true leaders think of themselves as working for the people around them. Moreover, they love to serve rather than be served. Carver, in this case, is seemed to be a jerk, not a true leader according to this assumption. Because he thinks he deserves to be served by his employees. He insults his subordinates and peers both verbally and through email and is seriously aggressive in order to gain results.

Fundamental attribution error - According to this attribution, it seems that Carver doesn't take into consideration and underestimates the impact of external factors on Lee's behavior, like situational influences, and relates Lee's behavior to internal factors only, like personality or disposition.

Insensitivity and task-oriented - He is less concerned about the people he works with. He fails to listen, and is insensitive to his subordinates' feelings. Also, he doesn't try to recognize personalities of the individuals working around him. Here, we can say, that in addition to being insensitive and task-oriented, Barry's attitudes and behaviors could be classified under theory X because he thinks his subordinates are inherently lazy to work and they intentionally don't take their responsibilities properly.

On the other hand, Mr. Barry is giving grave stress to his employees by sending scathing emails, which cause them feel as if they were assaulted or castigated. Moreover, He is setting absurd and ridiculous expectations, and isn't eager to appreciate good initiative. He is also exaggerating the truth and behaving insensitive by blaming Mr. Lee Keilo.

Additionally, it seems that he possesses a very low level of locus of control because it's quite obvious from his words to Keilo, where he states that, "why aren't you as committed to this project as I am". We can find from his speech that he always blames others for what happens around him without regarding his part in the issue. By behaving this way, he is increasing hatred against him of his subordinates and demotivate them tremendously.

Question 03: How realistic is it that carver (or anyone) can change his own leadership skills? What kind of help might he need?

Answer 03:

According to the book and our lecture in the class, we have studies and learned "The Leader Blind Spots". Based on this concept, we can name Carver 'being a jerk' since he really hurt people's feelings and damaged the organizational performance without even knowing as such. The book gives an example of Lars Dalgaard, Former CEO of SucessFactor Company where Lars Dalgaard never realized that he was a jerk until a leadership coach helped him to treat his employee in a well manner.

Carver can change his leadership style by knowing his personality because leadership style is changeable. Particularly, he should work on changing his current communication style through some useful techniques such as learning the basics of nonverbal communication, like emails, asking for honest feedback of his subordinates and peers, engaging subordinates in decision making, learning how to understand people's personalities whom he is working with. Moreover, he should recognize his personality type to make sure under which personality dimension his personality can be categorized through personality recognizing exercises in the book. For instance, the 'Big Five Personality Dimension' such as, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and openness to experience describes whether the person is moderate, low or high degree on each dimension. Once it has been specified, the leader can change his leadership style accordingly. Similarly, I believe by providing necessary leadership coaching such as, understanding your own personality, how to treat others with respect, and acknowledge each employee's strengths and weaknesses will help Carver to maintain a balance between being a nice leader and being merely a jerk.