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Exploring Leadership Drivers and Blockers pp 51–61Cite as

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Exploring the Reservoirs of Drivers and Blockers (Conscious and Unconscious): Other Personality Traits and Characteristics

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Abstract

In this chapter, we delve into further aspects of the conscious and unconscious related to personality traits. This is because beyond the “Big Five”, there are a number of other personality traits, dispositional variables and characteristics such as self-esteem, locus of control, self-efficacy, positive and negative affectivity, risk aversion and tolerance for ambiguity that are associated with change and can act as drivers and blockers. We review literature on self-esteem to illustrate how it can act as a motivational force shaping an individual’s behavior as well as make individuals see change as a threat, evoking resistance behaviors. We discuss how locus of control influences people’s psychological response to change with more internal locus of control enabling people to better manage change. We look at the role of self-efficacy as well as positive and negative affectivity and argue that different levels of these can make people optimistic or pessimistic about their commitment to change. This is followed by a discussion on risk-aversion and tolerance for ambiguity which influence how people handle challenging, ambiguous or dynamic situations. We highlight some other areas such as behavioral patterns and life experiences where future research about drivers and blockers appears important.

Keywords

  • Leadership development
  • Self-awareness
  • Conscious and unconscious
  • Drivers
  • Blockers
  • Drivers and blockers
  • Immunity to change
  • Insightfully aware leadership
  • Leadership transformation
  • Individual change
  • Leadership development objectives
  • Coaching approaches and tools

You get to love your pretence. It’s true, we’re locked in an image, an act—and the sad thing is, people get so used to their image, they grow attached to their masks. They love their chains.

Jim Morrison, lead vocalist of ‘The Doors’

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Notes

  1. 1.

    An example from our research (see Sect. 10.1, Example 31).

  2. 2.

    An example from our research (see Sect. 10.1, Example 26).

  3. 3.

    An example from our research (see Sect. 10.1, Example 27).

  4. 4.

    This is similar to the construct of confirmatory bias in decision sciences (see Evans, 1989; Plous, 1993), which refers to people’s propensity to deliberately disregard or neglect information inconsistent with their beliefs.

  5. 5.

    An example from our research (see Sect. 10.1, Example 6).

  6. 6.

    An example from our research (see Sect. 10.1, Example 28).

  7. 7.

    Self-efficacy is different from self-esteem which “represents a self-perception about one’s competence and value”

    (Donald & Pierce, 1998, p. 51).

  8. 8.

    An example from our research (see Sect. 10.1, Example 32).

  9. 9.

    Although the majority of the studies (e.g. Abouserie, 1994; Horner, 1996) treat these constructs in isolation, research by Judge, Erez, Bono, & Thoresen (2002) suggests that measures that assess self-esteem, locus of control, neuroticism and generalized self-efficacy are strongly related and may be the indicators of the one latent higher order construct.

  10. 10.

    An example from our research (see Sect. 10.1, Example 29).

  11. 11.

    An example from our research (see Sect. 10.1, Example 33).

  12. 12.

    An example from our research (see Sect. 10.1, Example 30).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Professor of Management Practice, INSEAD, Asia Campus, Singapore

    Ian C. Woodward

  2. Senior Lecturer, Liverpool Business School, Liverpool, UK

    Samah Shaffakat

  3. Adjunct Professor of Leadership, INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France

    Vincent H. Dominé

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  1. Ian C. Woodward
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  2. Samah Shaffakat
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  3. Vincent H. Dominé
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Correspondence to Ian C. Woodward .

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Woodward, I.C., Shaffakat, S., Dominé, V.H. (2019). Exploring the Reservoirs of Drivers and Blockers (Conscious and Unconscious): Other Personality Traits and Characteristics. In: Exploring Leadership Drivers and Blockers. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6276-7_6

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