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Introduction
Interest in leadership and social influence can be traced to earliest recorded history ([9] Bass, 1990; [14] Bryman, 1996). However, the process of trying to understand this critical but complex element of human enterprise has been marked by discontinuity with periods of great excitement interspersed with protracted periods of despair and discouragement ([31] Hunt, 1999). Great advancements in social and organizational psychology in the post-Second World War period were accompanied by the emergence of schools of management and an academic-oriented study of management with roots in the scientific method and a rigorous approach to social science ([22] Drucker, 1988). Numerous theories and approaches grew out of this period of productivity only to lose headway during the second half of the twentieth century. By the mid-1960s the lack of a model of leadership that could fully describe the dynamics of the leadership process and the inadequacy of current explanations had significantly discouraged both practitioners and academics ([36] Koontz, 1961). [31] Hunt (1999) points to the emergence of transformational leadership theory as the force that reenergized the field and stimulated a great leap forward in the understanding of the leadership process.
Traditionally, most studies of leadership concentrate on the behavior of the leader and the impact of that behavior on organizational and individual outcomes. As the study of transformational leadership developed and matured, the end of the century marked a general agreement on both the nature and the efficacy of transformational leadership behaviors ([39] Lowe et al. , 1996; [11] Bass and Avolio, 1990; [10] Bass, 1999). Invigorated by the availability of a comprehensive theory and enjoying unusual unanimity in regard to the behavioral dynamics of transformational leadership (Table I [Figure omitted. See Article Image.]), researchers have sought a more complete understanding of the leadership process by directing their attention beyond the observable behaviors of leaders to leader's dispositional qualities and characteristics in an effort to expand and enlarge their understanding of the social influence process.
Generally following an established line of research regarding the impact of personality on transformational leadership (e.g. [53] Schyns and Sanders, 2007; [23] Felfe and Schyns, 2006; [32] Judge and Bono, 2000) and specifically informed by [27] Hautala (2006), the essential question in all of these studies is: to what extent...