Some thoughts about the psychology of Leadership and Power /part 2/

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Today allegations of supernatural powers are made less often, but they are not completely unknown. Of course, more moderate utterances - tirelessness, intuitive intuition, lightning power of decisions - are made in one form or another by many prominent and successful people. And when they do not do it for themselves, they are made for them by others who, for some personal reasons, are rewarding this type of explanation of success for some simpler and simpler reasons. Undoubtedly, in the recent times, supernatural explanations of leadership have yielded to more rational. It is still generally perceived in the terms of personal abilities, but it is already assumed that the abilities in question are the same as those possessed by all normal people: it is assumed that those who become leaders simply have them to a greater extent . For many years, however, attempting to define and measure such abilities failed.

This is due not only to the primitiveness and the unreliability of the early measurement techniques but to a more important reason. The features identified as important for leadership are often nothing more than purely verbal expressions of the way the researcher imagines the leader. Quite a lot of the lists that have been developed have very common things. Typical cases in them appear such qualities as piety, honesty, courage, stubbornness, intelligence, reliability, imagination, hard work. This way of thinking is still very common and still exists not because it is useful in analyzing and understanding the phenomena of leadership but because it expresses a deep and popular wish as leaders should be. Modern studies of personal traits take on a very different path.