Character for Leadership: The Role of Personal Characteristics

Character for Leadership 
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what is gleaned from the situation to develop his or her character for leadership 
through means of feedback. 
Though not discussed in literature concerning VLT, others have examined 
conceptual distinctions between character and abilities. Character is a component of 
personality while abilities relate to one’s competence to perform a task. For 
example, intelligence is considered an ability (Nicholls, 1990). However, 
personality is not contingent on intelligence to function properly. Said another way, 
personality traits operate independent of one’s cognitive ability (intelligence). A 
further example of the distinction between trait and ability is the mixed model of 
emotional intelligence (Bar-On, 1997; Caruso, Mayer, & Salovey, 2002) which 
explicitly attempts to combine the two, as compared to pure ability measures of the 
concept of emotional intelligence (Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso, 1997; Salovey & 
Mayer, 1990). Nonetheless, personality in general and character in particular are 
distinct from one’s ability to enact specific behaviors and, therefore, garner 
different attention in the model presented. 
Vision is one of the constructs included in VLT, but it is an ability of the 
leader rather than an aspect of the leader’s character. However, the foundational 
components of vision may be tied to leader self-regulation; such capacity to see 
long-term implications and consequences of an action impacts one’s decision to 
postpone the desire for immediate gratification (McClelland & Boyatzis, 1982). 
Other leadership theorists consider vision to have both cognitive and affective 
components that then lead to specific behaviors (Lubin, 2001; Snyder, Dowd, & 
Houghton, 1994; Strange & Mumford, 2002). However, because VLT considers the 
construct of vision as the primary evaluation of a leader’s cognitive ability, this 
study does not intentionally consider the visionary leadership component of VLT. 
Within VLT, the construct called confident leadership has been developed 
as one of the components of the leader’s character. This concept has been referred 
to by Sashkin and Sashkin (2002) as self-efficacy and self-control and has been tied 
somehow to emotional intelligence. Leader confidence involves personal control or 
belief in overall unifying purpose and meaning in life’s events, a concept 
equivalent to another self-regulatory construct called sense of coherence 

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Character for Leadership 
20 
 
(Antonovsky, 1985). Each of these concepts is a component within the construct of 
behavioral self-regulation or self-directedness as defined in this study. 
In addition to the leader’s character trait of confidence, VLT includes the 
construct called follower-centered leadership. This concept involves the leader’s 
motivation for leading, specifically whether leadership actions are personally or 
other motivated. Foundational to this discussion is the concept of power motive 
(McClelland, 1975). VLT addresses this issue as a component of effective 
visionary leadership. Follower-centered leadership corresponds to the 
cooperativeness of the leader as defined in this study. 
Measures 
Initially, the Leader Behavior Questionnaire (LBQ) was developed by 
Sashkin (1996) to assess visionary leadership. It was this instrument which was 
shown by McElreath (1999) to correlate substantially with Bass’ (1985) Multifactor 
Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) as well as Kouzes and Posner’s (1987) 
Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI). However, the LBQ originally only included 
behaviors associated with transformational leadership, not the personal 
characteristics of the leader nor transactional elements. The LBQ was subsequently 
revised to include these elements in line with developments in VLT and came to be 
known as TLP (Sashkin et al., 1997). 
The TLP (Sashkin et al., 1997), as well as the first generation of the 
instrument, the LBQ, has been used to assess transformational leadership in a 
variety of organizational contexts such as business, elementary and secondary 
schools, engineering teams, and health care facilities (Colyer, 1996; Dixon, 1997; 
Major, 1988; Silver, 2000). These studies demonstrated the significant link between 
visionary leadership and effective organizational performance. 
Summary 
Implicit in this pursuit of the foundational character to insure authentic 
transformational leadership is a model of leadership processes that the leader 
follows in the selection of specific leadership behaviors (see Figure 2). VLT is one 
theory that incorporates the personal characteristics of the leader in addition to the 
leader’s behaviors and the situational context. This study entails a further 

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Character for Leadership 
21 
 
investigation of the leader’s character as a component of these personal 
characteristics. However, there is discrepancy concerning the use of the term 
character
and its relation to other concepts mentioned in the literature.