What Defines a Leader?
A groundbreaking lexical approach to leadership personality — derived from the language people actually use to describe leaders.
Take the Free AssessmentThe Five Dimensions of Leader Personality
These five factors emerged organically from leaders and followers' generated language — not from theoretical assumptions.
Energy
Charisma, excitement, enthusiasm, and activity level. Similar to extraversion trait
Psychopathy
The dark side of leadership — antisocial orientation, lacking empathy and remorse, corruption and disingenuousness.
Organization
Focuses on order, structure, performance-orientation, and accuracy. Similar to conscientiousness trait.
Irritability
Hot-tempered, aggressive behavior and volatility. The low end reflect calmness.
Intellect
Wisdom, rationality, and cognitive sharpness.
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Validated Across Three Sectors
Business, Military, and Religious leadership share common personality dimensions — but with meaningful differences in benchmarks.
Mean scores on 1–5 Likert scale · Source: Keshet (2025), PhD Dissertation, Study 4
Research Overview
Watch a presentation of the key findings from Dr. Keshet's PhD dissertation.
Visual overview of the leadership personality taxonomy
Why a Lexical Approach?
Most leadership research starts with theory — asking participants to rate leaders on pre-defined scales. The lexical approach goes the other way: it starts with natural language. By asking leaders to describe themself or followers to describe their leaders using varity of describtions, we capture the personality dimensions that actually matter to people, not just the ones researchers assumed would matter.
The Core Insight
If you want to know what personality dimensions matter in a leader, don't ask researchers — ask followers. The adjectives people naturally reach for when describing their leaders encode centuries of accumulated social knowledge about what leadership actually is.
Why Not the Big Five?
The Big Five personality framework (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism) was derived from descriptions of people in general. But in the leadership context, certain personality traits stand out and cluster into five distinct leader personality dimensions.
Two Additional Personality Dimensions from the Follower Perspective
When followers describe their leaders, two additional factors emerge beyond the five core leader personality dimensions:
Supportiveness — a warm, nurturing quality that followers cite as crucial but that Big Five measures as generic Agreeableness
Weakness — a factor describing ineffective, passive, or cowardly leaders, absent from all standard frameworks
Discover Your Leadership Profile
Complete the 50-item assessment and compare your profile against real-world business leader benchmarks.
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