A political leader's personality and leadership style have been of increasing interest for many scholars for decades. A variety of personality and leadership trait assessment studies have explored the connection between personality and political leadership style. Resulting correlations have served as reliable indicators for explaining how a political leader arrives at his or her decisions on certain political issues.
Muammar al-Qaddafi is popularly known as the strange and eccentric political leader who ruled Libya for over four decades. Qaddafi's personality and leadership styles have been interests to many researchers: Past studies on Qaddafi have largely been of the longitudinal variety. This has left open a need in the literature for systematic studies assess any possible correlation between Qaddafi's personality traits and leadership style. The current dearth of systematic studies on Qaddafi may be a result of his often changing, and at times seemingly erratic, political decisions.
Thus, previous studies do not provide a thorough understanding to the underlying reasons for his political behaviors and decisions.
In order to provide systemic information on the former leader of Libya, Muammar al-Qaddafi, this analysis explores his personality and leadership style by employing three types of content analysis methods as follows: 1) A framework derived from Erikson's conflict theory is set up and analyzes Qaddafi's personality development; 2) via Immelman's personality assessment method, this study examines Qaddafi's personality development pattern; 3) Hermann's LTA (Leadership Trait Assessment) method is applied to evaluate Qaddafi's leadership traits and styles.
Throughout analyzing and comparing the results from the three identified content analysis methods, it is found that Qaddafi's personality appears to have been deeply rooted in nationalism, naturalism, Islam, and anti-imperialism. Qaddafi's strong sense in his self-identity, which is set in his adolescence stage, is recognized to be the driving force for him to lead revolutions throughout his political life. Qaddafi is also found to have great interests on building relationships with others, and he appears to be focused on accomplishing revolutionary works- 'Arab Unity' and 'African Unification'.
Qaddafi has 'ambitious-outgoing' and 'contentious' personality patterns, and they match with most of the characteristics of his leadership styles. By analyzing Qaddafi’s leadership traits, it is recognized that there exists a correlation between his different leadership styles and specific time periods of his reign: During the 'time of revolutions' (1969-80s), Qaddafi shows an 'evangelistic', 'charismatic', and 'consultative' leadership style. He is 'accommodative' and 'charismatic' in his leadership style during the 'time to reconciliation' (1990s), and he is recognized to be 'consultative' in his leadership style in the 'time of rehabilitation' (2000s).
The results of this analysis provide a comprehensive overview of Qaddafi's political behaviors and decisions. Further, results from this analysis imply a strong correlation between Qaddafi's personality, leadership styles, and his resulting political decisions. However, because of conflicting results between the Millon Inventory of Diagnostic Criteria and Hermann's Leadership Trait Assessment regarding the "self-confidence" trait, there remains room for future studies and analyses.