Capacity to Lead and Psychology

The article addresses the question of what is it that a person possesses that allows them to exemplify “worthy leadership.” The authors mention that throughout the years in which this subject has been studied researchers have come up with three different “constructs” that define what the criteria of a leader will be. These three constructs are “Capacity to lead”, “commitment to lead”, and finally the “character to lead” mentioned from most to least in research respectively.  The authors also defined 12 factors that go under each of the 3 constructs to develop an entire model of “worthy leadership.”

Capacity to lead is defined as general intelligence, actual skills in leadership, and general personality traits. Commitment to lead is defined as ones actual want or desire to be in a position to be a leader. Character to lead is defined as “what the leaders will do, both positively and negatively across a variety of leadership contexts (368). The first factor under the capacity to lead is “capacity to reason and make good decisions.” The authors found that when it came to general intelligence across most jobs and tasks, general intelligence and complexity of a task were correlated very strongly with each other, however, when it came to general intelligence and leadership roles the correlation dropped.  This suggests that general intelligence is important but good leaders need more than only general intelligence in order to do their duties efficiently. The second factor under capacity to lead is capacity to see and realize the future. In short this dimension suggests that leaders should not only be able to intelligently look to the future but have the ability to look to the future and have a plan for dealing with it.  The third factor is the capacity to communicate and influence. This suggests that a leader should possess the ability to look to the future and have general intelligence but the leader should be able to communicate, and influence his followers to see the big picture. The final two factors are capacity to know and capacity to preserve and adapt, meaning knowing the industry that you are in and being able to cope with changes that may or may not be expected changes.

The second Construct, Commitment to lead includes 4 dimensions. These are commitment to excellence or the want to excel in the position you are put in, commitment to people and relationships; In other words if someone can work well with or through others it can only help their success as a leader, commitment to learning and personal growth or never stopping their pursuit to learn more about what it is they are dealing with and constantly adjusting themselves as a person to adapt to the new knowledge they gain, and finally commitment to stakeholders or caring about the people, not only the success of the company, in which people have stakes in.

The third construct, Character to lead, is described as the least studied and talked about construct in leadership until recently. This is the construct where most individuals fail as leaders. These factors are all about being ethical and keeping up with and enforcing the company’s policies .