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Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is the leader€™s media image which receives more attention than team-management skills. A leader€™s personal popularity and communication skills are important for the team as a whole to gain and retain power; this can tilt a political system towards personality politics (6.3.4.2) and it adversely affects the process for selecting leaders:
· People€™s votes in democratic elections are increasingly based upon their perceptions of the personality of the leader, rather than a party€™s manifesto.[1] This tendency is magnified by television, which enables voters to become increasingly familiar with the behaviour of presidential candidates. But the selection criteria for TV personalities do not match the job description for a good political leader €“ tending more towards charismatic than managerial. The desire to be a celebrity is not necessarily linked to an ability to encourage members of a team to give their best performance.
· Dictators come to power by being able to inspire, or at least control, their followers. This does not necessarily mean that they would run a country in the interests of all the people. The characteristics of a person who can seize power are aggression and self-confidence, which do not align with the need to listen to what the people want or, in the face of declining popularity, with the need to gracefully hand over power to someone else.
Neither selection process is likely to identify the most suitable leader; ideally both the team-management and the public-facing roles would be taken into account. This can be achieved if the team itself plays a part in deciding who should lead it, but in some democracies €“ notably America €“ this would have to be accompanied by changes in political campaigning to raise the profile of party policy above that of the leader€™s personality; an increased focus on policy might also make it more likely that people would elect a leader who would serve their best interests.[2]
© PatternsofPower.org, 2014
[1] A report entitled Personality, transformational leadership, trust, and the 2000 U.S. presidential vote, written by Pillai, R., Williams, E. A., Lowe, K. B. & Jung, D. (2003), provided a statistical analysis of that election with these conclusions:
€śTransformational leadership and attributed charisma were strongly associated with reported voting behavior for candidates Bush and Gore beyond party affiliation. Important extensions to earlier findings are that perceptions of candidate proactive behavior, empathy, and need for achievement were shown to be related to transformational leadership and attributed charisma, with trust in the leader an important mediating variable between leadership perceptions and voting behavior.€ť (p.1)
This report was published by Elsevier, in The Leadership Quarterly, 14(2), 161-192, and was available in May 2014 at http://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/K_Lowe_Personality_2003.pdf.
[2] Ronald Dworkin described American politics as €śtrivialised€ť, on the dust jacket of his book Is Democracy Possible Here?, and outlined the need for a more policy-focused public debate in chapter5.