Personality Matters: A Recap of Sibel Oktay’s Politics Workshop

by Kelsi Quick, PhD Student in Political Science and a Research Assistant at the European Union Center

The European Union Center recently co-sponsored with the Political Science Department a guest speaker, Dr. Sibel Oktay, for the Political Science Department’s ongoing speaker series, the “Politics Workshop.” Oktay, Associate Professor at the University of Illinois Springfield and current Jefferson Fellow at the United States State Department, gave a talk about her recently published paper, “Crisis Leadership in the Time of Covid: Effects of Personality Traits on Response Speed.” In her talk, Oktay discussed the effect of different personality traits on how quickly leaders responded to the outbreak of Covid in their respective countries. The results of her research demonstrate that personality traits do have a significant impact on how and why leaders chose to respond when they do, leaving us with many real-world implications.

Oktay builds a foundation for her argument by first explaining that people behave differently in the context of a crisis, and that personality is a major driver of this. Personality traits, furthermore, help shape and determine perceptions of a threat and how one should respond. Since crises by definition lack a common frame of reference for leaders to turn to, personality traits surge forth and fulfill the task of providing direction. Extant literature has traditionally talked about leadership personality traits in terms of charisma, pragmatism, proactiveness, and the effect of gender. Oktay, however, pushes back against these traditional models and advocates for a methodology known as Leadership Trait Analysis (LTA), which allows for researcher to analyze how leaders speak and relate to the world with the added benefit of the method being quantifiable and replicable. The main traits under consideration include a leader’s attitude toward their power position, a leader’s approach to gathering information and problem solving, and the leader’s approach to the world around them. Oktay argues that these traits, taken collectively, then shape a leader’s response speed to the Covid crisis.

By applying this LTA method to leaders from 32 European countries and focusing on seven main leadership traits, Oktay analyzes how these factors interact with the time (in days) it took for leaders to implement their first required mitigation response (i.e. lockdowns, social distancing). She ultimately concludes that leaders with higher degrees of self-confidence (defined here as something close to arrogance, stubbornness) and a tendency to challenge constraints are likely to have a slower response to implementing mitigation procedures. In contrast, leaders who score higher on the ‘openness’ trait are more likely to responder quicker in a crisis such as Covid. This leaves us with a few things to reflect on: 1) individual leaders were game-changers in the early stages of Covid response, and their responses mattered 2) this research suggests that leaders who have more openness are better suited for handling crises such as Covid and 3) who we elect to be our leaders, and the personality traits of those leaders, matter.

Posted in: Covid,leadership,personality,political science,Sibel Oktay