Assessing Leadership at the Naval Academy with a Biographical Inventory
Abstract
The aim of this study was to develop and validate a biographical inventory to measure personality traits predictive of leadership of U.S. Naval Academy applicants. Biographical measures have distinct advantages over personality and interest inventories, and similar instruments. Biographical measures can capture directly the past behavior of a person, probably the best predictor of his or her future actions. And the measures can deal with facts about the person's life, not the introspections and subjective judgments that make up the content of personality inventories and the like. As a result, biographical measures are likely to be less prone to misinterpretation, resistance, and distortion. The minimization of these problems probably accounts for the substantial validity of biographical measures in predicting a wide range of socially important variables. Recent reassessments of the empirical research on the personality correlates of leadership ability suggest that this ability can be successfully predicted. Consistent links appear to exist between personality traits and leadership. This reassessment calls into question the widely-held conclusion, stemming from influential reviews by Stogdill (1948) and Gibb (1954), that personality traits and other individual-difference variables do not distinguish leaders from followers, and that leadership is simply a function of the situation. This reappraisal of the work on leadership also raises the real possibility that a properly constructed biographical inventory, designed to measure relevant personality traits, may be able to assess leadership potential.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 1998
- Accession Number
- ADA362291
Entities
People
- Donald A. Rock
- Lawrence J. Stricker
Organizations
- Educational Testing Service