While the Conservatives look for a new leader, and speculation continues about Labour’s leadership, Adrian Furnham and Alex Haslam debate how leaders arise.

Dear Adrian,

Almost nobody nowadays believes that there is a simple constellation of traits or attributes that is capable of predicting whether or not someone will make a great leader.

Effective leaders are those who create, co-ordinate, and control a particular sense of ‘we-ness’ that they share with followers.  This sense motivates those followers to do the work necessary to achieve group goals. Thus, leadership is actually a process of social identity management.

It is certainly the case that particular skills are needed to do this, but rather than being constant these vary as a function of the norms, values and collective aspirations of the group to be led. I would also argue that things like charisma are actually attributions that are a product of this particular group dynamic rather than independent inputs.

My argument is therefore not that individually great leaders do not exist (they very clearly do), but rather that the key to understanding their greatness lies in a group dynamic that makes leadership both possible and powerful. To ignore that dynamic, as you (and most others) appear to, is not only to make a fundamental attribution error, but to perpetuate a dangerous, disempowering myth.

Yours, Alex

Dear Alex,

Yes, leadership is a social and dynamic process. But social influences differ from individual to individual. Their styles, some of which are successful and some not, are a function of their personality and ability.

The situationist sixties are over and we know now, through good research, that people do not change much once they have reached adulthood. Personality, ability and preferences are surprisingly stable. An extravert at 18 is an extravert at 68: people tested for their IQ in 1932 and again in 1996 were very similar.

There is now incontrovertible evidence of the heritability of many important human characteristics.

We also know that personality and ability predict an amazing number of things like physical health, including mortality; job performance, including leadership behaviour; social relationships, including marital success and failure; educational outcomes at school and university; and mental disorders, including drug and alcohol abuse.

The characteristic of great leaders is to unite and mould and inspire all groups they find themselves leading.

The myth is that anybody can become a leader. It may be sad, unfashionable and politically incorrect, but history, research and common sense shows the myth to be untrue. You need the right profile - and we know what it is.  Leaders need to be bright enough to learn new things and adapt.  They need to be psychologically stable.  They need to be conscientious.

Yours, Adrian

Dear Adrian,

While personality is often observed to be stable, I think this can be attributed to stability in the external world rather than genetic or purely psychic factors. When the external world changes dramatically, so do people's personalities (e.g., as shown in the rise in authoritarianism in 1930s Germany).

But even accepting your idea, the crucial point relates to the predictive power of personality. All the data here suggests that having 'the right profile' is simply not enough. In order to be influential, leaders need to represent the norms and values of a group in a particular context, and so to understand leadership we need to look closely at group dynamics, not just personality.

You say that 'the characteristic of great leaders is to unite and mould and inspire all groups they find themselves leading'. Do you think that Hitler could have led Britain in World War II or that he could lead Germany today?

Your use of the term ‘find themselves’ also suggests that the process of leadership is a passive one, and represents the‘natural’ manifestation of inherent ability. It isn't. It's an active, creative process in which leaders and groups play mutual roles.

Yours, Alex

Dear Alex,

No... only massive trauma changes personality, which is hard-wired.

Yes, attitudes like authoritarianism change, but people are remarkably stable. They choose and change their environments to suit their personality. What you see is what you get with most people over the age of 21.

I accept that having the right profile for leadership is not enough.  It is necessary, if not sufficient – as is the ability to lead. But social and cultural events affect the way leadership shows itself and is remembered.

Of course other factors play their part, including the socio-political situation and the followers’ personality and values. But choose any leader, like Churchill or Thatcher, Hitler or Stalin, and you will see from biographies how stable their characteristics were from an early age. They in part created the situations that made their leadership successful. And their hubris, which led to group-think, no doubt brought about their demise.

There is a massive change industry in clinical and business psychology precisely because individuals are so difficult to change

Yours, Adrian

Dear Adrian,

I accept that people have some choice over their environment, but this is very easy to over-state — our cultures and groups make a lot of choices for us, as do those of other people.

In organizations, for example, managers play a massive role in defining (often constraining) the groups that people are and aren't members of, and hence the sorts of leadership opportunities that they have. In contemporary organizational life it's hard to be a great leader when your group and job is restructured, or if you're made redundant.

In these contexts, it's very dangerous (and as research into the 'romance of leadership' shows, often very inaccurate) to see success as a fixed manifestation of leadership ability. It also leads to a situation in which leaders are placed on pedestals and followers relegated to the gutter — when in fact it is only their followership that makes others' leadership effective.

Indeed, there is an important political dimension to this debate that psychological analysis all too often overlooks. Thus, despite the fact that I believe the empirical evidence for your approach is moot, it will always retain its appeal in some quarters (typically the upper echelons of society) because it appeals to particular political tastes and fulfils useful legitimizing functions. This is true of my analysis too, of course — but, unlike you, the people who agree with me tend not to have a lot of political clout.

Yours, Alex

Dear Alex,

This is not a right-left wing or powerful-powerless debate about beliefs about leadership. It is, or should be a dispassionate evaluation of the empirical literature, which supports my case.

Interestingly, identical twins get more similar as they get older, not less similar. Despite the fact that they have different spouses, and different jobs, and live in different places, they grow more alike. Why?

First, ability and personality factors dictate how you see the world. Neurotics see the world as threatening; extraverts are optimistic, and so on.

Second, people evoke similar reactions in different people because of their beliefs and behaviours. The same people are attracted or not attracted to the same individuals. Some people like their leaders certain and bold, others caring and thoughtful.

Third, people choose and change the situations they find themselves in. So people live in a surprisingly stable world which reflects their personality and ability. They react to organisational change in predictable ways; indeed, they bring it about officially or unofficially, again as a function of their personality-based needs and values.

Yours, Adrian

Adrian Furnham is professor of psychology at University College London.

Alex Haslam is professor of psychology at Exeter University.