Trait-Based Perspectives of Leadership Stephen J. Zaccaro George Mason University The trait-based perspective of leadership has a long but checkered history. Trait approaches dominated the initial decades of scientific leadership research. Later, they were disdained for their inability to offer clear distinctions be- tween leaders and nonleaders and for their failure to account for situational variance in leadership behavior. Recently, driven by greater conceptual, methodological, and statistical sophistication, such approaches have again risen to prominence. However, their contributions are likely to remain limited unless leadership researchers who adopt this perspective address several fundamental issues. The author argues that combinations of traits and at- tributes, integrated in conceptually meaningful ways, are more likely to predict leadership than additive or indepen- dent contributions of several single traits. Furthermore, a defining core of these dominant leader trait patterns re- flects a stable tendency to lead in different ways across disparate organizational domains. Finally, the author sum- marizes a multistage model that specifies some leader traits as having more distal influences on leadership processes and performance, whereas others have more proximal ef- fects that are integrated with, and influenced by, situational parameters. Keywords: trait-based leadership, leadership theories T he quantitative analysis of leadership dates back perhaps to Galton’s (1869) Hereditary Genius. Gal- ton emphasized two basic points that have come to form, and sometimes misinform, popular notions of lead- ership. The first point defined leadership as a unique prop- erty of extraordinary individuals whose decisions are ca- pable of sometimes radically changing the streams of history (see also Carlyle, 1849). This point remains a most persistent view of leadership in the popular literature; in many best-selling books, authors seek to explain leadership by describing the transformational influences of certain individuals. The second point grounds the unique attributes of such individuals in their inherited or genetic makeup. Galton (1869) argued that the personal qualities defining effective leadership were naturally endowed, passed from generation to generation. The practical implication of this view, of course, is that leadership quality is immutable and, therefore, not amenable to developmental interventions. This perspective guided the preponderance of leader- ship research into the 20th century until the late 1940s and early 1950s. Then, on the basis of some important reviews (Stogdill, 1948; Mann, 1959), many researchers discarded trait-based leadership approaches as being insufficient to explain leadership and leader effectiveness. This rejection was widespread and long lasting, and it echoed in most of the major social and industrial and organizational psychol- ogy textbooks for the next 30 – 40 years (e.g., Baron & Byrne, 1987; Blum & Naylor, 1956; Ghiselli & Brown, 1955; Muchinsky, 1983; Secord & Backman, 1974). In the 1980s, research emerged that directly chal- lenged the purported empirical basis for the rejection of leader trait models (Kenny & Zaccaro, 1983; Lord, De Vader, & Alliger, 1986). Also, models of charismatic and transformational leadership rose to prominence in the lead- ership literature. These models, while recognizing the im- portant role of the situation in leadership, pointed once again to the extraordinary qualities of individuals as deter- minants of their effectiveness (House, 1977, 1988). More recently, a number of studies have linked personality vari- ables and other stable personal attributes to leader effec- tiveness, providing a substantial empirical foundation for the argument that traits do matter in the prediction of leader effectiveness (e.g., Judge, Bono, Ilies, & Gerhardt, 2002; Peterson, Smith, Martorana, & Owens, 2003; see Zaccaro, Kemp, & Bader, 2004, for a review). Thus, traits have reemerged in the lexicon of scientific leadership research. In this article, I argue for four critical points that need to be considered in models and theories positing leader traits and attributes as explaining significant amounts of variance in leadership. First, such frameworks cannot be limited in their elucidation of central leader attributes. Many research efforts focus their attention on small sets of individual differences that should predict leadership. Al- though other efforts do provide long lists of key leader attributes, they are rarely organized in a coherent and meaningful conceptual construction. Leadership represents complex patterns of behavior, likely explained, in part, by multiple leader attributes, and trait approaches to leader- ship need to reflect this reality (Yukl, 2006; Zaccaro et al., 2004). A second point concerns the integration of leader attributes. Rarely do studies consider how the joint combi- nations of particular leader characteristics influence lead- ership behavior (Yukl, 2006; Zaccaro, 2001; Zaccaro et al., Some material in this article is based on previous work by the author (Zaccaro, Kemp, & Bader, 2004). Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Ste- phen J. Zaccaro, Department of Psychology, MSN3F5, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA 22030. E-mail: szaccaro@gmu.edu 6 January 2007 ● American Psychologist Copyright 2007 by the American Psychological Association 0003-066X/07/$12.00 Vol. 62, No. 1, 6 –16 DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.62.1.6