Leadership Trait Analysis

Leadership Trait Analysis (LTA), developed by Margaret Hermann (1980), profiles political leaders' personalities from their spoken words to explain and anticipate foreign-policy behavior. It scores seven characteristics — the belief in one's ability to control events, the need for power, conceptual complexity, self-confidence, distrust of others, in-group bias, and task focus — from patterns in a leader's verbal material, norms them against reference groups, and combines them into broader leadership styles. It is a leading at-a-distance method for assessing leaders who cannot be interviewed or tested directly.