Assessing Leadership Style: Trait Analysis

Measuring the Motives of Political Actors at a Distance

able guide to the leader's personality, //they are useful in predicting
or interpreting the author's behavior. However, that very same con-
ditional also applies to any other method of making inferences about
the personality of a leader or, indeed, any other person.
Factors such as audience, campaign issues, popular mood, cultural
values, and political stereotypes do affect speech content, but there is
evidence that by themselves they do not wholly determine motive
imagery scores (see Hermann 198oa, 344; Winter and Stewart
1977a, 51). Thus it is possible for a political leader to talk about top-
ics such as the economy, national heritage, and even war and peace
from almost any manifest policy perspective and either use or not use
achievement, affiliation, or power images. In other words, the motive
imagery scoring systems seem to pick up the subtle shades of image
or emphasis that reflect personal factors rather than merely reflecting
the common currency of cultural symbols or ideological stances.

Reliability

Since the motive imagery content analysis system was derived from

TAT scoring systems, which have a reputation for low test-retest

reliability (see Entwisle 1972), many readers may wonder whether

this at-a-distance technique is reliable. Actually, several researchers

have shown that the common impression of low TAT reliability is

not, in fact, accurate (Smith 1992, 126-39; Winter and Stewart

1977b). Moreover, Winter (1991, 70—71) has shown that the at-a-

distance adaptation of these scoring systems gives split-half over-

time reliability coefficients in the range of .62 to .77, which suggests

considerable temporal stability.

Translation

The research that has been done on the effects of translation on

motive imagery scores (Hermann 198ob, 352 n. 2; Winter 1973,

92-93) suggests that translated documents yield about the same

scores as originals, so long as the translation was a careful one.

Final Cautions

While the motive imagery scoring procedure has furnished useful

insights in case studies and useful generalizations in research on

groups, some final cautions about the technique are in order. We