Exploring your Business Leaders through Virtual Characters -Persona Design and Small Experiments-

We propose a novel method to identify desirable leader images in each situation. Leader's characteristics have been researched. However, many researchers could not find unique his/her characteristics. Therefore, desirable characteristics are different in each situation which he/her meets. In order to capture the desirable characters in each situation, we apply the persona technique, which was firstly introduced by Cooper and then has been spread in the field of product development. The proposed method is characterized by the procedure: 1) set persona characters with various attributes, 2) assign the attribute values by orthogonal design techniques, 3) set virtual business situations, 4) based on the business situations, get questionnaire data on the personas from subjects, and 5) evaluate the data to get the leader images of the corresponding business situations. As results of our method, we detected the different in the sense of designed characters' attributes in each situation. KeywordsPersonas; Competency; Leadership; Personal requirements; Human developments.