Assessing Leadership Style: Trait Analysis

Assessing Leaders' Personalities

Human Motives and Their Measurement

Major Dimensions of Motivation

Psychobiographical studies often invoke a wide variety of different
motives, "goals," or other dynamic processes—sometimes con-
structed ad hoc, sometimes drawn from psychological theory—to
explain leaders' behavior and political outcomes. Psychologists have
proposed a variety of typologies or dimensions of motivation or
goals. (Motive and goal are used interchangeably to indicate behavior
that shows direction and persistence.) Freud, for example, grouped
all human motives into two broad categories: libidinal or love
motives (also called the "life instincts") and aggressive or death
instincts (Freud [1940] 1964; see also Winter 1996, chap. 3). Traces
of these groupings can be seen in the paired motivational concepts of
communion and agency used by later theorists (Bakan 1966; see also
Leonard 1997), as well as more recent concepts of attachment and
narcissism.
Murray and his associates (Murray 1938) proposed a very different
method of identifying fundamental human motives. On the basis of
an intensive study of fifty-one male college students and other young
adults, they developed a list of twenty basic motives or "needs" that
they believed necessary to give an adequate account of the young
men's important goals and strivings. These, in turn, can be grouped
or organized into two fundamental dimensions—interpersonal har-
mony seeking and individual assertive striving—that bear close
resemblance to the dualisms of Freud, Bakan, and others (see Wicker
et al. 1984). For the sake of simplicity and uniform terminology,
these two dimensions will be referred to as affiliation and power,
respectively.
Cross-cultural research also confirms the generality of affiliation
and power as motivational dimensions (Kornadt, Eckensberger, and
Emminghaus 1980). Such a convergence of theory, empirical
research, and cultural evidence suggests that affiliation and power are
nearly universal ways of arranging and describing goals.

Measuring Motives

For Freud, free association and the interpretation of dreams was the

"royal road" to an understanding of people's motives, since anxiety