The Psychological Assessment of Political Leadersprofiles by Winter focus on motivational mechanisms that specify
differences in how Clinton and Hussein engage in ego defense and
mediate self-other relationships. Hermann's analyses of cognitive,
affective, and stylistic personality traits identify their cumulative
effects on each man's leadership style for mediating self-other rela-
tionships in their respective institutional settings. The analyses by
Walker, Schafer, and Young and by Suedfeld and Tetlock concen-
trate on the beliefs and the cognitive style of each leader that act as
mechanisms of object appraisal.
The authors of these analyses also follow a rough division of labor
in which one presents a more intensive analysis of selected personal-
ity traits and the other identifies the leader within the context of a
typology or a particular configuration of personality characteristics.
Weintraub's identification of several personality traits for each leader
complements Renshon's dimensional analysis of Clinton's character
and Post's diagnosis of Hussein's clinical type. Winter's analysis of
their respective needs for power, affiliation, and achievement res-
onates with Hermann's location of the two leaders within a typology
of leadership styles. Suedfeld presents an analysis of each leader's
style of processing information from the decision-making environ-
ment while Walker, Schafer, and Young classify them within a set of
ideal types of operational code belief systems.
These different modes of analysis are captured by Greenstein
(1987, 66—68), who identifies phenomenological, dynamic, and
genetic analyses. Phenomenological analyses are represented by the
cognitive models of object appraisal mentioned previously, which
explore the link between observed behavior and relatively overt per-
sonality traits presented by the leader as symptoms of deeper person-
ality dynamics. Dynamic analyses include models of the mediation of
self-other relationships mentioned previously and "cover a host of
rather disparate explanatory operations... {ranging]... from rela-
tively atheoretical descriptions of the contingencies under which dif-
ferent aspects of phenomenology are manifested, though explanation
in terms of inner events that can only be characterized in terms of the
concepts of the various schools of personality theory." Genetic analy-
ses are represented in the psychobiographical portraits discussed pre-
viously, which look "for the aspects of inborn structure, maturation,