Assessing Leadership Style: Trait Analysis

The Psychological Assessment of Political Leaders

of Parliament, (2) the direct government-to-government communi-
cations between Great Britain and Germany in the July 1914 weeks
of crisis immediately before the outbreak of World War I, and (3)
the statements and letters exchanged by President Kennedy and Pre-
mier Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. He found
that power motivation increased and affiliation decreased in the years
just before Britain entered a war, as compared to the years during
which Britain stayed at peace. The same trends occurred during July
1914, as the World War I crisis escalated to war; in the peacefully
resolved Cuban Missile Crisis, however, the opposite trends
occurred, as power went down while affiliation went up.

Entrepreneurship and Economic Development

In his classic study, The Achieving Society, McClelland (1961) demon-
strated numerous links between high achievement motivation and
economic development, especially entrepreneurial behavior and
innovation. At the individual and corporate level, these links have
been established through laboratory and longitudinal studies of indi-
viduals, as well as archival studies of corporate documents. For exam-
ple, Diaz (1982) scored motive imagery in the annual letters to
stockholders of two American automobile manufacturers and one
Japanese automobile manufacture from 1952 to 1980. He found that
a company's achievement motive imagery scores from one year pre-
dicted that company's relative market share in subsequent years.
Wormley (1976) studied mutual fund managers and found that the
portfolios of managers with high achievement motivation increased
more rapidly over a five-year period, while portfolios of managers
with high power motivation showed more volatility (swinging both
higher and lower than the market trends).
At the national or cultural level, McClelland (1961) established
the connection between achievement motivation and economic
development by correlating achievement motive imagery scores
from children's school readers (and other cultural documents) with
subsequent national economic growth. Among preindustrial cul-
tures, achievement motive imagery in folktales was associated with
the prominence of full-time entrepreneurs and more advanced meth-
ods of producing food (hunting or agriculture rather than gathering).