Understanding ethical leadership with HEXACO personality dimensions

When investigating leadership from a personality perspective (see: Personality and leadership), a major question is what are the main dimensions of personality. At the moment, most researchers are familiar with the Big Five personality model that make a distinction between five main personality dimensions: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Emotional stability, Conscientiousness, and Openness to experience. Fewer researchers are aware that lexical research, which in the past has yielded the Big Five, actually provides more evidence currently for a maximum of six cross-culturally replicable factors of personality, which are known by the HEXACO acronym for Honesty-humility, Emotionality, eXtraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to experience.

The HEXACO model has had much success in explaining counterproductive outcomes that are less well explained by the Big Five model, such as counterproductive and unethical work behaviors, that are also highly relevant in leadership research. Interestingly, honesty-humility seems somewhat less heritable than other personality factors and more amenable to volitional personality change. Because ethical leadership is strongly related to honesty-humility, this opens up avenues to investigate the effects of personality change in leaders with a focus on ethical leadership.

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De Vries, R. E. (2012). Personality predictors of leadership styles and the self-other agreement problem. The Leadership Quarterly, 23, 809-821. Link

De Vries, R. E., Wesseldijk, L., Karinen, A., Jern, P., & Tybur, J. M. (2021). Relations between HEXACO personality and ideology variables are mostly genetic in nature. European Journal of Personality. Link

Thielmann, I., & De Vries, R. E. (2021). Who wants to change and how? On the trait-specificity of personality change goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Link