Exploring why leaders do what they do: An integrative review of the situation-trait approach and situation-encoding schemas

In order to enhance leaders' effectiveness, it is critical to clearly and accurately understand the underlying processes that contribute to leaders' decision making and behavior. The traditional trait approach to understanding leaders' underlying processing carries limitations and does not capture any of the situational characteristics that may be important. We thus advance the situation-trait approach by introducing the Cognitive Affective Processing Systems framework more fully into the leadership domain. A primary benefit of integrating this framework is that it identifies an attribute largely overlooked by leadership scholars, yet foundational to leaders' processing and behaviors: situation-encoding schemas. We integrate and review decades of research on four sets of situation-encoding schemas to demonstrate their important role in determining why leaders do what they do. This consensus shift, novel focus on situation-encoding schemas, and integration of four disparate sets of well-studied situation-encoding schemas has important implications for leaders' self-awareness, meta-cognition, effectiveness, and development.