Traits meet the dustbin

Most scholars today relegate “great men” and trait theory to history. Phillip Slater and Warren Bennis (1990) argued that great men are “outmoded” in democratic models that require organizations to be flexible while making the individual of “little significance” (pp. 270-271). Contemporary critics of traits theory continue to assert that it is unsuccessful because it ignores important situational factors and behaviors. However, some modern scholars found that the problem with trait theory was not its assumptions but the lack of satisfactory research techniques to validate the assumptions (Kirkpatrick & Locke, 1991).