Too Much of a Good Thing – Why Leaders Can be Too Extraverted

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Extraversion is considered a positive trait particularly in leadership. As a leader you will be the centre of attention and need to put yourself out there. So, extraversion must be a good thing, right?

Well, maybe not. In fact, we have in our assessments always said that there is a risk with high levels of anything – the too much of a good thing principle. And some recent research just out has lent support to this.

This research by Hu et al. from Ohio State University conducted two related studies. The first involved 260 business undergraduates who had been randomly assigned to self-managed teams and worked in these teams on various projects over the semester.

Everyone rated themselves on two facets of extraversion, assertiveness but also warmth and friendliness. They also assessed their own prosocial motivation i.e. willingness to help others. Then at the end of the semester everyone rated who they thought was seen as a leader within their group, how much they were liked, and how much they would go to this person for advice or help.

The second study was completed with 337 employees in a large retail company and had similar setup with self-managed teams without formal leaders and the same assessments.

So, you may wonder what the results were.

Well yes, there was a general link between extraversion, leadership and how much these leaders were liked. But only to a limit. There was a sweet spot as we have also seen in our data. Being extraverted is generally positive on either dimension measured – but high levels were then seen as negative. If you are too assertive you will be seen as pushy and aggressive which is not well received. Similarly, if you are overly warm and social this makes some people feel uncomfortable or overwhelmed.

However, excessive extraversion was forgiven if it was seen as being prosocially motivated i.e.. being assertive for somebody else.

So, this goes to show that you can have too much of a good thing – extraversion is generally seen as being positive in leadership scenarios but beware of too much of a good thing. What we also noticed in our assessments was that single dimensions were also not very predictive of effectiveness only when clustered with multiple other traits. So yes, you can fall on the introverted side and still be a good leader.

This research was carried out with informal leaders but as these show personal opinions I assume this would translate to formal leadership positions. Of note also is that in life and in business there are many informal leaders – and this shows that these will certainly fall mostly in that sweet spot.

Andy Habermacher

Andy is author of leading brains Review, Neuroleadership, and multiple other books. He has been intensively involved in writing and research into neuroleadership and is considered one of Europe’s leading experts. He is also a well-known public speaker, speaking on the brain and human behaviour.

Andy is also a masters athlete (middle distance running) and competes regularly at international competitions (and holds a few national records in his age category).

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Reference

Jia Hu, Zhen Zhang, Kaifeng Jiang, Wansi Chen. 
Getting ahead, getting along, and getting prosocial: Examining extraversion facets, peer reactions, and leadership emergence.
Journal of Applied Psychology, 2019
DOI: 10.1037/apl0000413

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