Assessing Leadership Style: Trait Analysis

The Psychological Assessment of Political Leaders

Politics is a complicated arena, involving many situational forces

in addition to individual personality factors and many other aspects

of personality besides motives. Thus any individual leader's motive

profile should be considered as only one aspect—a set of possibilities,

biases, opportunities, and liabilities—from among the whole array of

inner and outer forces affecting the leader in any concrete situation.

Appendix

INTERVIEWS WITH SADDAM HUSSEIN

April 8, 1974 Interview with Arab and foreign journalists
January 19, 1977 "Detente and the Zionist conflict" (interview with
Sakina al-Sadat)
July 17, 1978 Newsweek interview
July 17, 1979 Interview with Fu'ad Matar
October 13, 1979 Interview with Al-Mustaqbal correspondent Fu'ad Matar
July 19, 1982 Time interview
May 31, 1983 Interview with journalist Charles Saint-Prot
March 8, 1989 Interview with 'Uthman al-'Umayr
July 25, 1990 Interview with U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie
August 30, 1990 Interview with CBS anchor Dan Rather
January 28, 1991 Interview with CNN reporter Peter Arnett

(*Judged to be more "spontaneous" interviews)

Notes

1. There are exceptions to this problem: Hermann (1980b) was able to assess
   motives of several Soviet Politburo members by scoring comparable speeches,
   and Schmitt (1990) was able to compare four general secretaries of the Commu-
   nist party of the Soviet Union to each other by scoring their first political report
   to a party congress. Winter (1992a) compared British "Sovereign's Speeches"
   ("Speech from the Throne") to Parliament over a span of 380 years.


2. Those interviews appearing in books rather than in magazines or in broad-
   casts, plus the transcript of the July 25, 1990, interview with U.S. ambassador
   April Glaspie, of which there were only excerpts from an Iraqi-supplied tran-
   script, were published by the New York Times on September 23, 1990, well into
   the Gulf Crisis.


3. In contrast, achievement-motivated people are able to learn from their
   mistakes by paying attention to negative results (McClelland and Winter 1969,
   chap. I). As shown in table 16.2, Saddam Hussein's achievement motive score is
   almost two standard deviations below the mean for world leaders.