Who's the Boss? A quantitative study about informal leadership in small groups

Sammanfattning: Leadership is a huge area, with countless of schools and organizations trying their best to educate the leaders of tomorrow, but what is actually leadership? What happens in a group when no one is appointed leader? What is it that makes the group listen to some over others and who has the power over the agenda and the ability to influence people into following his or her lead? The purpose of this thesis was to analyze what effect gender and personality traits have on making people in a group listen to and follow someone's lead. The purpose was also to study how a majority and minority setting of gender constellations in the groups affect the results. The study used a quantitative approach and a field experiment was conducted on high school students in Stockholm. The cooperation exercise, Desert Survival Trial, was used. The participants first made an individual ranking of objects necessary to survive in a desert and then they were divided into groups and made a group ranking of the same items. By comparing the two rankings the level of influence each person has over the group's decisions was calculated. The closer a person's ranking was to the group's ranking, the higher influence over the group's decision that person had. Following this, the students answered a Big Five Personality Traits questioner to measure their personality traits. The study cannot support the hypothesis of a gender effect on a person's influence over the group's decisions. It can support that the combination of the Big Five Personality Traits has a larger effect than gender on a person's ability to influence the group's decision.