Assessing Leaders' Character. Character and Leadership: A Theoretical Integration of Two Emerging Concepts. Implications for Research and Teaching

摘要

This report results from a grant tasking Swiss Military Academy at ETH Zurich as follows: What are the key considerations in developing a program to assess and build leaders of character. The goal of this research was to answer this question by analyzing the relationship between the two emerging concepts of 'character' and 'leadership' and derive implications for further research and teaching in leadership development programs. As a result, we can now conclude: (1) Character is a holistic, multi-faceted psychological construct. (2) Character focuses on cognitive, affective, and behavioral aspects. (3) Character manifests in morally challenging situations. (4) Character includes many moral and non-moral sub-constructs. (4) There are a large number of instruments to measure these cognitive, affective and behavioral moral and non-moral sub-constructs. (5) Functional and hierarchical requirements should be considered with regard to a decision of important character sub-constructs. (6) Selection or development purposes may require to focus on different character sub-constructs and evaluation methods; there is a mutual interaction between functional/hierarchical levels and selection and development purposes, and (7) Results of all character assessments should be interpreted with the necessary caution as the interrelation between the many subconstructs is not well understood yet.