When it comes to being an assertive leader, seems you need to come down somewhere in the middle – not where you’d think a real go-getter would want to be. But the results of a study coming out in the February issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association (APA). Organizational leaders who come across as low or high in assertiveness tend to be seen as less effective, the study says. In the study, researchers asked workers for their views of colleagues’ leadership strengths and weaknesses. The most common strengths reported included conventional leadership traits like intelligence, self-discipline, and charisma.
But the most common weaknesses found that assertiveness was by far the most frequently-mentioned problem, sometimes more than charisma, intelligence, and self-discipline combined. Researchers caution that the study does not suggest that the solution for leaders is to be moderately assertive all the time. Instead, they claim that leaders seen as moderately assertive may be better able to ratchet up their responses when called for and to tone down their behavior when necessary. Leaders stuck at the extremes of assertiveness may not be given a whole lot of slack.
