The leader exists to help others in an unbiased and unassuming way, nourishing any and all followers (“The wise leader is like water”).

Models of leader attributes that dominated in the early part of the 20th century emphasized leader traits. Several surveys and reviews of this literature identified a number of dispositional qualities that distinguished leaders from nonleaders, including intelligence, originality, dependability, initiative, desire to excel, sociability, adaptability, extroversion, and dominance. However, no single personal quality was strongly and consistently correlated with leadership.

Leadership reflects an orientation to promote, direct, and manage social action. This orientation is grounded in a need for dominance and constructive power. The effective engagement of leadership processes follows from high self-confidence and from significant cognitive and social capabilities.

The LBDQ-VII is one of the earliest and most widely used instruments of leadership behavior. It emerged from the Ohio State leadership research teams and evolved to its present form to cover 12 aspects of leadership behavior. These were representation, demand reconciliation, tolerance of uncertainty, persuasiveness, initiating structure, tolerance of freedom, role assumption, consideration, production emphasis, predictive accuracy, integration, and superior orientation.