Character for Leadership: The Role of Personal Characteristics

Purpose Statement 
Since one’s character has a direct effect on the decision to enact leadership 
behavior, it is important to investigate the impact of the character of prospective 
religious leaders. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of three 
independent components of leader character—expressed as self-directedness, 
cooperativeness, and self-transcendence—on the dependent variable of effective 
leadership behaviors. 
Past research of VLT has supported the relationship of leader characteristics 
and effective leadership (Colyer, 1996; Vona, 1997) as well as effective leadership 
development (Lafferty, 1998) but has done so with a seemingly inadequate 
understanding of the underlying components of a psychological formulation of 
character. VLT does incorporate character as a foundational component within the 
theory. However, the character subscales of The Leadership Profile (TLP; Sashkin 
et al., 1997) used to assess one’s visionary leadership, specifically confident 
leadership and follower-centered leadership, have not been correlated with an 
instrument intentionally designed to measure psychological formulations of 
character. In addition, no study has considered the interaction of these variables in a 
population preparing for leadership in Christian ministry.
This study will attempt to assess the three character constructs of self-
directedness, cooperativeness, and self-transcendence measured by the TCI 
(Cloninger, Przybeck, et al., 1994). In support of the concept of character 
development for leadership, Clark (2003) demonstrated the constructive use of the 
TCI to help leaders understand their character development needs in order to 
develop appropriately as leaders. This study expanded this concept and used 
character to evaluate differences in effective leadership for a population of 
seminary students preparing for positions of ministry leadership. Therefore, this 
study is promising because a leader’s character is used to evaluate these differences 
in effective leadership behaviors. 

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Character for Leadership 
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This is a quantitative study designed to answer the following research 
question: how much do effective leadership behaviors differ based on one’s level of 
self-directedness, cooperativeness, and self-transcendence? This investigation will 
evaluate the differences these independent variables have on effective visionary 
leadership behaviors by studying prospective ministry leaders.