Week 2- Trait Theories in Action

In my second week of my internship, I have already come to realize and notice some theories of leadership that are quite prevalent among my peers and colleagues at Wells Fargo. One theory that was the first that I observed is the Trait Theory of Leadership. I have had multiple meetings with all of the interns for this summer. In each, I have noticed instances where people I have interacted with exhibited certain traits that have high correlation with leadership emergence as well as leadership effectiveness.

In my larger meetings, which are facilitated by our program managers, we usually have a guest speaker or speakers who exhibit some of the traits that are associated with leadership. When learning about the trait theory, the traits that are the most associated with leadership have been grouped into the Big Five Theory of Personality Traits. These traits include extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness. One of the meetings that I attended had alumni from the same internship program that we are currently in, and they talked about some of the best practices to use during our internship and beyond in a panel discussion. One trait that immediately struck me that all of the program alumni employed was extraversion. All of the alumni exhibited this type of extraversion that made them confident in themselves and also made me feel like I could easily trust and agree with the advice that they were giving to us. When looking at the correlation of the Big Five personality traits and their effectiveness and emergence of leadership, extraversion has one of the highest correlations for emergence of leadership. I knew that these alumni who were talking to us were going to have a good chance to become leaders at Wells Fargo in the future due to their high levels of extraversion.

A second trait that I observed from these young alumni was that they exerted a certain level of conscientiousness, which also has one of the highest correlations with emergence of leadership. Conscientiousness means that a person has a strong work ethic, impulse control, and a drive to get tasks accomplished. I could tell by the way in which they talked about some of the projects that they had to accomplish that they exhibited this trait. I think that Wells Fargo’s expectations for employees have a lot of overlap with the Big Five Personality Traits. It gives me a lot of confidence that the company I am working at recognizes the traits that are needed for leaders to emerge.