Leaders are expected to have both intra and inter personal skills. Intrapersonal skills are domain of psychoanalysis (Hogan and Warrenfeltz). Intrapersonal skills develop early and have important consequences for career development in adulthood. This domain seems to have three natural components. The first can be described as core self-esteem (Judge, Locke and Durham), emotional security, or perhaps resiliency. The second component of intrapersonal skills concerns attitudes toward authority. The third component of intrapersonal skills is self-control, the ability to restrain one’s impulses, curb one’s appetites, stay focused, maintain schedules, and follow routines. Intrapersonal skill is the foundation on which management careers are built. Persons with good intrapersonal skills project integrity; from the perspective of implicit leadership theory (i.e., what we expect to see in leaders), integrity is the first and perhaps the most important characteristic of leadership (Kouzes and Posner).
The domain of interpersonal skills is the traditional subject matter of role theory (Sarbin), although a systematic elaboration of this point would take us too far afield. Individuals who have interpersonal skills appear to be poised and social adepts. They appear to be approachable and rewarding to deal with.
Four components to interpersonal skills can be identified:
- First is a character of individuals to put himself/herself in the place of another person and try to foresee what the other person sees in the world and what expectations he/she has through the interaction. Mead (1934) has called this character “taking the role of the other.”
- The second character refers to a skill. This skill involves anticipating correctly, when one tries to foresee the other person’s expectations. This refers to the area of accurateness in interpersonal perception (Funder), and it is related to cognitive ability and social experience, which sometimes is thought, as an extrovert is bright and more accurate than an introvert who is perceived to be dull.
- The third component of interpersonal skill involves adopting the anticipation regarding the other person’s expectations and enacting accordingly in his/her interaction with the person.
- The fourth component of interpersonal skill refers to possession of self-control to stay focused on the other person’s expectations. This is where interpersonal skills have common characteristics with intrapersonal skill.