Leadership and Expertise : a personality structure in context. A lexical approach to a contextualized personality structure for leaders and its predictive validity towards leadership expertise.

Scholars have argued that there is a need for the development of a contextualized personality model because current literature lacks in the existence of a model that can assess personality in a specific role or context. The study contained two parts, with the first part focused on developing a contextualized personality structure focused on leaders, based on a lexical approach. To develop this structure, an extensive online questionnaire including 418 personality-descriptive adjectives was distributed to 119 participants (i.e. leaders), based on self-assessment. Conducting a Principal Component Analysis of the retrieved data resulted in the development of five dimensions: Destructive, Intellect/Competence, Human-Orientated, Proactive/Powerful, and Instrumental. The developed contextualized personality structure for leaders showed a satisfactory reliability. Subsequently, the second part of the study was aimed at exploring the predictive validity of the developed contextualized structure towards leadership expertise. A multiple linear regression analysis has been conducted over the five personality dimensions and a leadership expertise scale. Unfortunately, this analysis did not show significant results and no conclusive answer could be given to the second research question. The most important suggestion for future research is that the contextualized personality structure for leaders could be examined in combination with other important leadership aspects.