Leadership coherence: An application of personality coherence theory to the study of leadership

The purpose of the current work was to extend recent developments in basic personality theory to the leadership domain. Accordingly, we introduce a new construct labeled leadership coherence, which refers to the notion that a leader’s behavior fluctuates in a consistent, reliable, and predictable idiographic manner across situations, thus capturing the purposeful and systematic variability in a leader’s behavior and decisions. Data were obtained from a diverse managerial sample (n = 109) employed in a variety of work settings. Stable and replicable intraindividual cross-situational profiles were found providing initial empirical support for the concept of leadership coherence. As the understanding of the ways in which leaders react and behave within and across situations is central to most leadership theories, examination of leadership behavior from an intraindividual cross-situational or coherence framework is a logical progression of leadership theory. This study provides the first step in this direction.