Psychologists reveal the one personality trait that is actually a major sign of a good leader

Not everybody is built for leadership. A true leader needs several qualities such as empathy, intelligence, integrity, the ability to make strategic decisions and much more. A recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggested that individuals with domineering and impulsive personalities might not be the best fit for the position of an ideal leader. Research was conducted on roughly 3,500 volunteers who were screened through a series of 7 experiments. A mix of students and working adults participated in the experiment where they had to either read about or interact with other individuals who possessed different levels of self-control. 

The researchers monitored these individuals to figure out "how much people tend to behave in ways aligned with their goals." It was deduced that people with high levels of self-control are more powerful characters who are fit to take on leadership responsibilities over people with low control. “It did not matter whether the colleague seemed to deliberate before acting or just acted without thinking," Pamela Smith, an associate professor of management at the Rady School of Management and co-author of the study, said. “What mattered for participants’ judgments was whether the colleague acted in line with their goals. This pattern held across a variety of goals in our experiments, including saving money, being healthy and reading books.” 

In one of the experiments, the participating adults pictured a scenario where one of their coworkers had a goal of losing weight and getting fit. The participants thought about their colleagues either consuming a large dessert or strictly cutting out dessert from their diet. The researchers found that the participants considered the colleague who was abstaining from desserts to be a better leadership material because they showed signs of self-control. Those who failed to meet ambitious goals were also perceived as someone unfit for more powerful roles, despite delivering the same performance as their colleagues. 

In a second experiment that was carried out to figure out how self-control leads to power most of the time, a group of undergraduate students was made to interact with people who had set various reading goals for themselves. Some of those readers set a target of completing 200 pages by the end of each week, whereas others opted for a moderate goal of reading only 50 pages. All those individuals ended up reading approximately 100 pages by the end of the week. However, the students participating in the study considered those who failed to meet their reading goal to be less powerful. They were not interested in having these people as their leaders for future tasks and experiments.

“To motivate their employees, organizations often want employees to set stretch goals, goals that are challenging and hard to reach. However, we found that setting a stretch goal and not meeting it makes someone look less powerful than setting an easy goal and surpassing it,” Rady School PhD student Shuang Wu, the first author of the paper, revealed. The study was titled “Self-Control Signals and Affords Power" and was co-authored by Texas A&M University associate professor, Rachel Smallman.