Personality or Role? Comparisons of Turkish Leaders Across Different Institutional Positions

Abstract

Personality approaches to politics are often criticized for not examining the effect that institutional role constraints have on individual beliefs and preferences. When leaders appear to change their stance when they change roles, it is assumed that roles have a determining influence. Modern personality theory and contemporary sociological role theory, however, view the effects of roles as interacting with agents' personalities. In this article, we investigate this question by comparing personality profiles of three Turkish leaders ( € Ozal, Demirel, and G€ ul) during their tenure as prime minister and during their subsequent time as president. For G€ ul, we perform an additional comparison during his time as foreign minister. The personality profiles are in the form of quantitative scores generated from machine-coded content analysis of leaders' words using the Leadership Trait Analysis method. We hypothesize that different leaders will be more susceptible to changing role contexts, depending on core personality traits, and that different traits are more likely to change with new roles. Overall, our results suggest that leaders' traits are fairly resistant to changes across roles and that task orientation is the most likely trait to change as leaders adapt to different role demands and expectations. This study makes a contribution to our understanding of the interaction between personality and political contexts by offering specific theoretically derived hypotheses and by empirically and statistically examining a preliminary set of expectations that could be applied more broadly to other leaders.When leaders change their political and institutional position, many would expect them to adapt to that new position. Their expressed beliefs and style of engaging with others might change with different role demands, expectations of role-appropriate behavior, and the powers and incentives associated with the position. When leaders do adapt to new roles, this change in 1 0162-895X

Profiling foreign policy leaders in their own language: New insights into the stability and formation of leadership traits

“…Overall, then, our research design would have allowed for the identification of changes in leaders’ traits over time. However, in empirical terms, our findings corroborate those by Cuhadar et al (2017) with respect to the general stability of leadership traits despite changes in actors’ political roles. Also in their study, only one trait changed in a statistically significant way, albeit TASK and not IGB as in the case of Brandt.…”

“…Against this background, scholars have recently started asking whether changes in institutional roles lead to alterations in leaders’ traits. Cuhadar et al (2017) have examined this question with respect to three Turkish leaders who moved from the post of prime minister to the post of president. Their overall finding was ‘that the personality characteristics for these leaders remain fairly stable across role changes’ (Cuhadar et al, 2017: 50).…”

“…Cuhadar et al (2017) have examined this question with respect to three Turkish leaders who moved from the post of prime minister to the post of president. Their overall finding was ‘that the personality characteristics for these leaders remain fairly stable across role changes’ (Cuhadar et al, 2017: 50). More specifically, they found that only the trait of TASK is likely to change when actors move from one role to another as a result of ‘the changes in demands and expectations’ (Cuhadar et al, 2017: 52) that are associated with the different roles.…”

When leadership traits meet historic success: Hassan Rouhani and the nuclear deal of 2015

“…In recent years, LTA scholars shifted their attention to examining the effect of situational factors on leadership traits. Although Hermann (2002, p. 36) suggests analyzing the “effects of events and tenure in office” on leadership traits, recent LTA studies tackle the effect of role change on leaders’ personality traits and find that when leaders change their role in politics, some of their traits undergo statistically significant changes (Cuhadar et al., 2017a; Dyson, 2018). Cuhadar et al.…”

“…Cuhadar et al. (2017a, p. 39) find that “the leaders’ traits are fairly resistant to changes across roles and that task orientation is the most likely trait to change as leaders adapt to different role demands and expectations.” In another study, Cuhadar et al. (2017b) touch upon the effect of experience on leadership traits while examining leaders’ orientations to structural constraints but they find no significant correlation between change in traits and tenure in office.…”