Personality traits can be useful predictors of leader effectiveness and emergence. Although these traits are recognized as important, existing research has neglected the potential advantages of considering personality at the facet level to clarify and extend theory regarding how personality relates to leader outcomes, as well as improve the use of personality as a predictor of leader effectiveness and emergence. This meta-analysis examines how narrow personality dimensions relate to leader emergence and effectiveness across theoretically relevant contextual differences including leader hierarchical level and organization type. A final set of k = 203 data sets was analyzed to examine these relationships. The results of this work highlight that personality facets vary substantially in their relationships to leader effectiveness and emergence. This variability can be used to advance theory regarding specific personality-leader outcomes relations and to improve the prediction of leader outcomes when the effects of facets are considered in regression weighted composites. The results also suggest that certain facets' validities differ in student samples or depending on a leader's hierarchical level within an organization. This work contributes to understanding regarding when and why narrow dimensions of personality may be useful to consider in relation to leader outcomes and helps clarify distinctions between traits relevant for leader emergence and leader effectiveness. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Baker et al. (Mon,) studied this question.