Projects + Management = Project-Management

Gehring, Dean R.: Applying Traits Theory of Leadership to Project Management; in: IEEE Engineering Management Review, Vol. 35 (2007), No. 3, pp. 109ff.
And also in: Project Managment Journal, Vol. 38 (2007), No. 1, pp. 44-54. 

I, personally, have mixed attitudes towards the whole Personality Traits Theory. While I still think there is some ground for the NEO-PI constructs and scale, I really do believe the whole Meyers-Briggs-Type-Indicator (MBTI) is total crap, especially using a magical sorting hat which uses binominal (E or I, S or N, T or F, J or P) values on dimensions, when the scale seems to be normally distributed. Furthermore there seems to be proof that the whole thing is situational. I am an eNFP by the way.

However Gehring outlines the typically looked for leadership competencies of project managers in a very nice structured way (see my graphical summary). The author further describes the personality traits usually found with specific MBTI types. He then matches competencies to MBTI types.
ENTJ, ENFJ, INTJ, ISTJ, and INFJ art the top 5 matches between competencies and personality types. Unfortunately the sample is rather small (53 respondents) and the article lacks any statistical information about the validity and quality of the results.

This entry was posted on Freitag, Juli 11th, 2008 at 13:14 and is filed under Leadership, Personality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.