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managerial performance is very difficult to measure. It is therefore essential that we realize the difficulties
25 not only in predicting who will achieve positions of leadership, and who will perform well as a leader, but
also in evaluating the selections once they have been made.
4.Training and experience seem to have little to do with the ability to select leaders. Interviewers, be
30 they executives, psychologists, or trained personnel managers, are not much better than chance at picking
effective executives, and they are frequently worse. Each interviewer tends to approach the job with his
own idea of what a good executive should be like, what the executive's job will be, and what is needed.
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5.Webster (1964) discovered that the interviewer tends to form an initial impression within the first four
or five minutes, and that he tends to search for additional information to support and substantiate his
hunches. Webster, Wagner (1949), Mayfield (1964), and others have demonstrated that interviewers
40
often disagree with one another quite radically, that the candidate rated best by interviewer A is likely to be
rated poorest by interviewer B. This means that a person's career may depend on which interviewer he
happens to hit that day.
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6. Similar disappointing results in predicting future behavior on the job have been obtained even where
the interviewers were highly trained psychologists and psychiatrists selecting psychology trainees for the
Veteran's Administration (Kelly and Fiske, 1951). Only when interviewers refrained from making
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inferences —
in effect, when they minimized the importance of interviewing in the first place—did their
predictions lead to some success. The most notable example is Ghiselli's (1966) study of interviewing
potential stockbrokers. In interviews with 507 candidates, the best predictor turned out to be simply how
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much a man knew about the job for which he applied. Ghiselli's
predictions were thus mainly based on
screening out men who did not know what to expect in the stock brokerage business and had little idea of
why they wanted to enter it. The best predictor of clinical success in the Kelly and Fiske (1951) study was
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the Strong Vocational Interest Inventory, a test which matches the candidate's interest patterns to patterns
of men who had remained (or survived) in the particular field or profession. In general, therefore,
interviewing is a poor way of selecting executives and tends to contribute more «noise» than true
information about the applicant's chances for succeeding.
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7.1t is important to reiterate that good performance criteria are essential for rational selection. Given all
the difficulties and inaccuracies of interviewing and testing, if the personnel manager at least knows what
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sort of person he is looking for, he has a better chance of finding him. This is especially true in business.
Because the nature of a manager's job is diversified, exact criteria are extremely difficult to specify. Even
when we do have some general idea of what traits are needed for a particular job, we cannot be sure which
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exact level of the particular trait is most beneficial. Suppose that we are picking firstline supervisors in a
production department. We may know that we would like someone who has enough education so that he
can easily handle the administrative aspects of his job, but exactly how much education is enough, and how
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much is too much? A person who is overeducated for the job is likely to
become ineffective. Many
unemployed scientists and engineers are turned down for jobs because the company is afraid that they are
overqualified and will therefore become bored and dissatisfied.
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8.Another selection danger is that of placing much emphasis on the one or two criteria we think are
important. A personnel director may believe that a foreman's success depends largely on having a pleasing
personality. He may then end up picking individuals who have gone through life on charm rather than
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merit or effort. Without goad criteria and sound follow up studies, he will never learn whether his
predictions are right or wrong, and he will therefore go right on making inaccurate selections.
ARE THERE LEADERSHIP TRAITS?
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9.We have taken a rather pessimistic look at selecting leaders by interviews. What is the possibility that
we can select leaders by means of leadership traits? By a trait we generally mean a personality attribute or
a way of interacting with others which is independent of the situation, that is, a characteristic of the
100 rather person than of the situation. If leaders are born and not made, why should we not be able to develop
some tests which tap the individual's ability to lead others? Many business executives, military men, and
laymen firmly believe that there are inborn qualities or attributes acquired early in life which make a
person a good leader. What is the evidence?
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l0.There is certainly no lack of research addressed to the question. In fact, the search for leadership traits
was the most important single activity with which leadership theorists concerned themselves before
110 world War II. The truly remarkable success of the intelligence testing spurred by the needs of World War I
led to a natural extension of interest in the measurement of other psychological abilities and traits.