Trait Approach to Studying Leadership
Sheila Pounder
LDR/531
May 30, 2012
John Healy

Trait Approach to Studying Leadership
The trait approach to studying leadership uses the assumption that some people are natural leaders with certain attributes that pertains to their personality, motives, values, and skills (Yuki, p. 13, 2010). The studies sort to identify what are the specific traits of leadership. Examples of some of the leadership traits the study found are high intelligence and action-oriented judgment, task competence, achievement-oriented, the ability to motivate people, courage, and resolution driven. This approach was one of the earliest processes used to identify what makes a great leader great. The studies conducted assumed that some people are born with leadership traits, and some are not. Those not possessing identifiable traits are designated as followers.
A weakness of the trait approach is that “the previous research efforts failed to find any traits that would guarantee leadership success” (Yuki, 2010, p. 13). A person identified with the attributes of a leader is not guaranteed to be a successful leader. A second weakness of the approach is that it focuses solely on the leader and ignores the followers (Travis, 1999-2012). For a person to lead there must be someone to follow. If an identifiable trait is “the ability to motivate people,” there must be followers to motivate for there to be a leader. A third weakness is that the research also failed to take into consideration how changing variables affect people reactions (Yuki, p. 13, 2010). A change in a situation could cause someone that is a follower to act as a leader even if he has no identifiable leadership attributes. A situational change could also be something outside an identifiable leader’s ability to deal with and therefore, leave him unable to function as a leader.