The Impact of the Big Five Personality Traits on the Leadership Styles: An Empirical Study Applied on the Branch Managers of Banks Working at the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan

摘要

The aim of this study is to examine the five big traits(extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientious, and neuroticism), and to investigate their impact on the prevailing leadership style of the branch managers of banks working at Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. To achieve this aim, the study utilized a questionnaire consists of two validated, well established, international instruments: the first one is the Big Five Inventory (BFI) developed by John and Srivastava (1999) and includes 44-item inventory that measures an individual on the big five factors (dimensions) of personality, the second instrument called Least Preferred Coworker Scale (LPC) scale developed by Fiedler to identify a person’s dominant leadership style. This questionnaire has been distributed to a simple random sample consist of 265 branch managers of those banks. A total of 105 complete questionnaires has been received back at a response rate of 40%. After analyzing data and testing hypotheses, the study revealed a lack of impact of the big five personality traits on the leadership styles of the branch managers of the banks working in Jordan, this lack of impact appeared in both cases: combined five traits, and individual one trait. The study revealed also that four of the five personality traits (extraversion, openness, conscientious, and neuroticism) are available at an unaccepted level in the traits and attributes of the branch managers of banks working in Jordan, meanwhile the trait agreeableness is the only trait available at an accepted level on the traits of those managers.