A new kind of leader

The personality of Jacinda Ardern

Image: stuff.co.nz; Clare Curran, Chris Hipkins, Grant Robertson, Jacinda Ardern - the Labour of Love team for the 2016 Oxfam 50 km trail walk

It will take time to fully assess Jacinda Ardern’s legacy (although that won’t stop immediate reactions), here we want to focus more on her different approach to leadership.  Ardern’s empathetic approach to tragedy and potential tragedy (the Christchurch killings and the threat of the pandemic in 2020) highlights what makes her different from leaders who had come before her.  We make the case that the combination of her gender and her empathy may also be a trigger for some of the recent antagonism directed against her.

Adern’s other-focus is also illustrated by her decision to quit leadership. Her decision to stand down as Prime Minister provided the opportunity for someone else better suited to take over that leadership. Her sacrifice could be a gain for the party - providing more of a chance for success in the 14 October 2023 election.

Attempting to get a handle on the Ardern style of leadership we crowd-sourced a personality profile of Ardern in late 2020 – pulling in responses from a range of New Zealand’s organisational psychologists.  We used the five-factor or OCEAN personality model. This does an excellent job of describing how people feel, think and behave in the five-dimensional personality space that clarifies what makes each of us unique.

Research into the personality correlates of leadership has previously highlighted the E (for extraversion) dimension.  Extraversion comprises both assertiveness and enthusiasm – and was the big contributor to the profiles of leaders.  The A factor (for agreeableness, comprising both compassion and politeness) did not appear to be either a positive or negative aspect of a leader’s effectiveness.

There is a confound in this result.  The researchers were sampling a world where males dominated leadership.  Women leaders at the end of the last century were very much in the minority. And women are disproportionately more agreeable – researcher Daniel Nettle notes that the average woman scores higher on agreeableness than 70% of men.

Ardern’s profile (as assessed at a distance by our psychologist sample) was notable for the relative highs of both conscientiousness (industriousness and orderliness) and agreeableness. Extraversion was in evidence as was openmindedness (openness and intellect).  Nervousness (withdrawal and volatility) was lower.

These ratings are from 16 New Zealand psychologists in late 2020, they used a 1 (low) to 3 (high) scale for each of the Big Five personality dimensions (Openness, Conscientious, Extraverted, Agreeable, Nervous). The bars are the average, and the ‘error bars’ represent +/- one standard deviation.

Extraverted leaders take up more space – these are the people who own the room, set the agenda, and demand that people follow their lead. These leaders tend to be effective when there is a simple solution that needs to be enacted.

When dealing with a situation requiring buy-in and collaboration rather than acquiescence, such as staying at home, wearing masks and getting vaccinated, a warmer, more empathetic approach works better.

A rigorous comparison of Covid-19 deaths across the 50 states of the US compared the leadership of male and female Governors.  Researchers Kayla Sergent (Ohio State University) and Alexander Stajkovic (University of Wisconsin-Madison) found compelling differences in deaths across states.  States lucky enough to have a woman leading them when a state-wide stay-at-home order was made had hundreds of deaths (to 5 April 2020), those led by males averaged over 4,000 deaths.  A significant difference was the communication style of the women Governors.

The women leaders showed more empathy.  This was shown in two distinct ways.  These leaders demonstrated greater awareness of the feelings of others (“I know that…people are feeling squirrelly from being at home so much with their family.  I know that people are worried about getting a job so they can pay their bills…I have these same fears”; Governor Gretchen Whitmer, 17 April 2020).

And these leaders were more likely to pitch their emotional response in a way that matched the welfare of others (“resources are available to you, whether it be economic or mental health or labor employment”; Governor Krisi Noem, 6 April 2020).

In New Zealand Google tracking of people’s locations indicated that people stayed at home through the lockdowns, and the country achieved the targeted 90% of two vaccinations by December 2021 (big ups to the New Zealand Herald for its promotional efforts on this).

Since the high of the 2020 election, Ardern’s popularity has come down, and there has been a corresponding increase in criticism, some of it bizarrely aggressive.

A theme of more reasoned criticism is the slow pace of progress on social priorities, such as child poverty.  Ardern’s emphasis on accord and collaboration might be a factor here.  Her strategy is to play the long game, to ensure that there is sufficient political buy-in and social buy-in to ensure the sustainability of initiatives.  So the need to take a long-term perspective on her legacy.

That hyper-aggressive, divisive reaction though – did Ardern have a role in triggering that?  She is not the only target of such attacks – journalists, scientists taking a science communication role, and other politicians have taken flack.  Many of these targets are women.

Research into the mindset of extremely conservative people (verging on authoritarian) indicates their tendency to have fixed views about gender roles.  An illustrative study by Andrew Christopher and Mark Wojda (of Albion College) found that authoritarians subscribed to a view that women should conform to traditional roles (sample item: An employed mother presents problems for her children).

For such people, Ardern, especially a warm, emotionally open, woman making decisions on the serious issues the country faces is anathema – a wrong that must be righted. The anger we hear is the righteous anger of those who want a return to a simpler world.

What we hope for is that New Zealand continues to have leaders who are open to a diversity of opinions and can lead collaborative approaches to long-term solutions.

Stewart Forsyth and Iain McCormick are executive coaches with a strong interest in the application of psychology to leadership development and organisational effectiveness.