The Psychological Assessment of Political LeadersAll of these strategies will also produce some assessment of the
degree of conceptual commensurability and empirical correlation
among the various approaches where there are overlapping personal-
ity or behavioral features. Is the use of such concepts as risk orienta-
tion, cognitive style, needs for power, achievement, affiliation, con-
trol over historical development, and conceptual complexity by the
contributors to this volume commensurable? That is, do they mean
the same thing? If so, then do the indicators that measure them cor-
relate highly? If the answers to these two questions are "yes," then
that happy configuration will allow the indicators to be used inter-
changeably, depending upon the availability of data for a particular
leader.
If one or both answers are "no," then the validity of the measures
needs to be qualified. They are either measuring different features or
different dimensions of the same feature. If it is the former, then the
uses of the underlying concept are partly incommensurable. If it is
the latter, then perhaps they may be fruitfully combined into an
overall index. An example of these potential difficulties and previous
attempts to wrestle with them is the discussion by Suedfeld, Gut-
tieri, and Tetlock in this volume regarding the initial use of concep-
tual complexity to refer to a stable personality trait and the growing
realization that it also varies across contexts. This empirical finding
led to a distinction between conceptual complexity and integrative
complexity to distinguish between the default value and the arousal
value within the context of cognitive manager theory.
Future Applications
Future applications of these approaches to leadership analysis are
going to face some challenges in relating their respective models to
different aspects of a leader's political behavior. The single biggest
challenge is to establish reliable and valid measures of that behavior.
While the authors have devoted a great deal of attention to develop-
ing measures of personality, they have expended relatively little
effort on the systematic observation of decision-making processes
and actions by the leaders. Addressing this gap is important for
assessing both academic research and practical applications. Unless
the outcome is clearly specified and measured, it is difficult to deter-
mine the predictive and explanatory power of the causal mechanism