Accounting

Internal medicine

Business

Personality

Job satisfaction

Test (biology)

Big Five personality traits

Common-method variance

Biology

Incremental validity

Meta-analysis

Trait

Test validity

Developmental psychology

Paleontology

Psychology

Leadership style

Psychometrics

Variance (accounting)

Programming language

Computer science

Trait theory

Transformational leadership

Transactional leadership

Medicine

Social psychology

Personnel Psychology

The leadership literature suffers from a lack of theoretical integration ( Avolio, 2007 , American Psychologist , 62 , 25–33). This article addresses that lack of integration by developing an integrative trait‐behavioral model of leadership effectiveness and then examining the relative validity of leader traits (gender, intelligence, personality) and behaviors (transformational‐transactional, initiating structure‐consideration) across 4 leadership effectiveness criteria (leader effectiveness, group performance, follower job satisfaction, satisfaction with leader). Combined, leader traits and behaviors explain a minimum of 31% of the variance in leadership effectiveness criteria. Leader behaviors tend to explain more variance in leadership effectiveness than leader traits, but results indicate that an integrative model where leader behaviors mediate the relationship between leader traits and effectiveness is warranted.

TRAIT AND BEHAVIORAL THEORIES OF LEADERSHIP: AN INTEGRATION AND META‐ANALYTIC TEST OF THEIR RELATIVE VALIDITY