Assessing Leadership Styleself-worth and a show of self-confidence. A score on this trait is
determined by calculating the percentage of times these personal
pronouns are used in an interview response that meet the three crite-
ria. The overall score for any leader is his or her average percentage
across the total number of interview responses collected for that par-
ticular person.
Leaders whose self-confidence is high are more immune to incom-
ing information from the environment than are those with low self-
confidence. They are more generally satisfied with who they are and
are not searching for more material on which to evaluate themselves
and their behavior. "New information relative to the self is ...
ignored or transformed in such a way as to maintain consistency in
behavior" (Ziller et al. 1977, 177). Such leaders are not subject to the
whims of contextual contingencies. They are neither the victims of
events nor are they compelled to adapt to the nature of the situa-
tion—consistency in behavior is too important. Information is
filtered and reinterpreted based on their high sense of self-worth.
Political leaders, however, who are low in self-confidence are eas-
ily buffeted by the "contextual winds." Without a well-developed
sense of who they are, such leaders tend to continually seek out infor-
mation from the environment in order to know what to do and how
to conform to the demands of the circumstances in which they find
themselves. Input from others about what they are thinking and feel-
ing is critical to knowing how to act in any situation. Thus, the
behavior of these individuals often appears highly inconsistent,
matched as it is to the nature of the setting, not to the needs and
desires of the individual. To compensate for feelings of inadequacy,
these leaders seek to become the agents, representatives, or delegates
of political groups that can help to enhance their self-confidence.
Conceptual Complexity
Conceptual complexity is the degree of differentiation that an indi-
vidual shows in describing or discussing other people, places, poli-
cies, ideas, or things. The conceptually complex individual can see
varying reasons for a particular position, is willing to entertain the
possibility that there is ambiguity in the environment, and is flexi-
ble in reacting to objects or ideas. In the opposite manner, the con-
ceptually simple individual tends to classify objects and ideas into