Motive Profiles Of Leaders And Followers

Understanding Personality and Leadership

Leader Appeal, Leader Performance, and the Motive Profiles of Leaders and Followers: A Study of American Presidents and Elections by David Winter examines the types of traits which are common in leaders and their followers with a look at three specific motives. With an examination of achievement motives, affiliation-intimacy motive, and the power motive one is able to analyze the terms of some of the greatest and not so great American Presidents.

The article starts with an introduction into what is considered the Weber-Freud model of leader characteristics and appeal. The idea that Max Weber had was that the charm a President had was related to the leader’s appeal to his followers. The leader is considered

There was a mix of previous data from Donley and Winter (1970) and Winter and Stewart (1977) which were “mixed together and newly scored by two trained and reliable scorers” (Winter 198). The other portion of this study is that of American society and this was taken from the work of McClelland (1975) who took documents from each decade, took 10 or so lines, and scored on the motives. This then allowed the comparison between the Presidents and American

Every President when they run must have a social motive, whether they have it in the front or back of their mind. The most accurate line from this article is this: “Indeed, among American presidents it appears that the greatest presidents were those who were least congruent with the followers of their society” (Winter 201). This is an accurate statement which allows me to make the generalization that society does not always know what is best, as well as certain types of leaders are going to be better for the country than others. All leaders are different, but according to this study there is a general trend which connect the best with a different motive than those who are considered secondary leaders. Winter’s results were much in line with those of other studies he used as framework to build his analysis. Without the use of other studies, the explanations and use of his own data would have made his powerful conclusion of power motive leaders as the greater leaders inaccurate and unconvincing. While reading through the article and seeing how personality can affect ones’ social motives or leadership appeal and performance one can think back to the basic psychology principle learned in a Psych 101