Personality traits and the endorsement of competing leadership roles: evidence from officer cadets enrolled in the Danish Defense College

To be effective, public-sector managers often need to perform competing leadership roles. Yet little is known about how individual differences shape their endorsement of these roles. Drawing on the Competing Values Framework, we examine the influence of Big Five personality traits on leadership role endorsement among Danish military officer cadets, an important but understudied segment of the public-sector workforce. Relying on 1,022 responses from a unique multi-wave survey, we find support for most of our hypotheses: openness to experience predicts endorsement of open systems-oriented roles; agreeableness predicts endorsement of human relations-oriented roles; and conscientiousness predicts endorsement of both internal process- and rational goal-oriented roles. However, our results also show that both agreeableness and conscientiousness relate to endorsement of roles across CVF leadership domains. These findings indicate a more complex pattern of relationships between personality traits and leadership roles than previously observed. Overall, the results suggest that future military leaders who value both cooperation and task accomplishment are characterized by specific constellations of traits already in the formative stage of their careers. In this way, our study advances public management scholarship by offering new insights into leadership role development among military officers.