Study on Assertiveness Sheds Light on Effective Leadership

Recent research suggests that striking a perfect balance between extremes of assertiveness can set a promising leader apart from the aspiring pack. Columbia Business School professor Daniel Ames, PhD, together with Francis Flynn, PhD, led a study involving workers who were asked about their colleagues’ strong and weak leadership points. Strengths were associated with traits such as charisma, intelligence, and self-discipline. On the other side of the spectrum, Ames and Flynn surprisingly discovered more than just the expected traits related to weaknesses. Ultimately, assertiveness emerged as a common ground among the responses.

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What makes assertiveness unique is that too little or too much of it can be detrimental. By comparison, lack of charisma, for example, is problematic, while too much or moderation of it is considered just fine.

After coding almost a thousand comments from respondents, Ames and Flynn discovered assertiveness as being the most common among leadership adjectives. Less common qualities were “able,” “focused,” and “sure,” among other things. Weaknesses, however, garnered more than 50 percent of descriptions pertaining to assertiveness. And from these descriptions, 48 percent was related to over-assertiveness, while the rest described the lower extreme.

But why wasn’t assertiveness equally common on the strengths side? Ames explains that leaders who get the right balance of this trait — not too much or too little — often go unnoticed to be dubbed as moderately assertive. Too much of it, say, leaders who always want things their way, could compromise their good relationship with their subordinates; too little, and they could be seen as weak-willed and fragile, leaders who cannot fight for their own interests.

But as Ames and Flynn warn, effective leaders do no necessarily follow moderation at all times. Rather, leaders know how to be firm about their agendas when needed, yet they also know when not to be too pushy so as not to reap the ire of their members.

Moreover, many leaders still get surprised when people highlight their inappropriate leadership styles. Ames and Flynn explain that most of the time, people do not always provide point blank feedbacks. No one would simply approach his or her bosses and say what a “jerk” they are.