A Study of Relationship between Individual Personality Types and Leadership Styles based on A Selected Number of Companies in the Colombo District

Abstract

Managers perform many roles in their organizations and how they handle various situations will depend on their styles of management. Leadership styles differ from one leader to another, and they depend on the individual personality types. Therefore, the objective of this research is to investigate whether there is a relationship between individual personality types and leadership styles of selected companies and to identify that managers behave differently because of their different personality types within the organizational context. For this survey, a group of companies engaging in different trades, such as logistics, freight forwarding, shipping, warehousing, air line agencies were selected. The sample consisted of the executive grade employees such as Directors, General Managers, Deputy General Managers, Managers, Assistant Managers, Executives and Junior Executives of these companies. The sample size is 100 out of a population of 400 executive grade employees. Personality Types were studied using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator instrument. Leadership focus was explored by administrating Leadership Focus Questionnaires. As such, two questionnaires were used for collecting data; one questionnaire for extracting data to identify the type of personality of each manager and the other questionnaire to identify the management style of each manager. Data were analyzed based on the correlation coefficient analysis. Accordingly, the study did not find enough evidence to prove the fact that there was a closed positive relationship between personality of managers and leadership styles. Thus, this study is consistent with the most of the findings of other researches in the same topic, and in this scenario it can be concluded that personality does not affect considerably to the leadership styles and there are number of other factors which affect the leadership styles. Accordingly, this study highlights that leadership style is a combination of attributes such as personality, situational factors, nature of the job, attitude of subordinates and superiors, competitiveness, labour turnover and the risk involvement.