Narcissistic Leaders: Achieving Success In The Workplace

There are many business issues we all face in the work place today. One of those that I can personally relate to my professional work life is narcissism. Stephen Robbins defines narcissism as being “the tendency to be arrogant, have a grandiose sense of self-importance, require excessive admiration, and have a sense of entitlement.” (Robbins, 2009, p. 113) We have one employee who has the attitude of narcissism. He is very arrogant and thinks that he knows everything about anything. This would be fine if he actually did. However, we are an electrical company. Meaning we work very closely with electricity, which is highly dangerous if you do not know 100% what you are doing. It makes it very difficult to work with someone like this. They make their co-workers feel belittled and they are less effective at the job. Narcissisms are very arrogant in the fact that they do not care about their co-workers feelings. In the article “Narcissism and Emotional Contagion”, Writer Anna Czarna states that after much research, “narcissists are less likely to “catch

What is narcissism? There is no specific definition for it. In psychology, narcissism is a negative and bad character trait. Narcissists have an excessive pride and they obsess with self. In other words, they think they are better than others and only care about themselves. In fact, being confident can also be accused as narcissism. However, narcissism is more than self confidence. Nowadays, Generation Y is being claimed as narcissists and there are so many reason that the critics try to list it out to prove their claim. In my opinion, Generation Y is just adapt to the environment they are living right now. Accusing Millennials as narcissist is not accurate.

Not all leadership traits are positive; some can sow discord within a company. My experience with a manager who was narcissistic is a perfect example. I worked as quality lab technician for an aerospace company with good pay and great coworkers. Upper management was tolerable, but my immediate supervisor had a personal agenda of seeking power. This supervisor would feel threatened at the thought of me receiving mentorship from other experienced people. He would enter every conversation with an accomplishment that we would later find out as a lie. He would praise his leadership in front of them while criticizing them later when they left the room. He was paranoid of leaving us alone to do our jobs because he thought we would be lazy without him; this resulted in him placing cameras in every corner of the room. We

I recently read a book called “Leadership & Self Deception” by the Arbinger Institute. It explains how self-deception is the most pervasive problem in organizations today. It gave some of the following examples of types of people who suffer from self-deception:

Narcissism is a terrible trait to have in an employee, you discuss the way narcissism makes one of your coworkers feel entitled to a leadership position. Hopefully he is not given any leadership powers until he reigns in his narcissism. Narcissistic leaders can be even more problematic than a narcissistic employee. Leadership is about influencing someone, or a group, to achieve a goal (Kinicki & Fugate, 2016). Narcissists struggle to influence people because they are too wrapped up in themselves. Their feelings of superiority can also lead to them being short or condescending with employees.

Like other employees or human beings, leaders also have their own sets of weaknesses that may prove to be pernicious to the progress they make while conducting their mandated duties. There is a cluster of personality traits that are referred to as Dark Triad. According to O'Boyle et al. (2012) Dark Triad personality traits refers to characteristics like selfishness, arrogance, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Even though these character traits were effective when applied to certain setups in the past, they also have the potency to adversely affect the productivity of an organization’s employees. The nature of Dark Triad personality traits is that they do not make room to accommodate good work relationships and receptiveness towards

The psychodynamic leadership theory asserts that the first experience of leadership started on the day he or she was born. The rationale of the theory has it roots in the development of psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud. The approach suggests leaders can become more efficient once they understand their own psychological makeup. It evaluates the psychological makeup of an individual by determining what motivates his or her reactions and responses to situations of people around them. The main intention of the approach applies to the enhancement of the overall situation the leader learns as well as their team members. Providing more awareness of the personality characteristics of team members, resulting in a better understanding

“A: I am not sure if I would make a good leader. B: I see myself as a good leader.”). Participants are asked to choose the statement they most agree with. It is comprised of four subsections measuring the following: Leadership/Authority, Superiority/Arrogance, Self-Absorption/Self-Admiration, and Entitlement/Exploitation (Emmons, 1984, 1987). The measure is scored such that higher scores indicate higher levels of grandiose narcissism (Raskin and Terry, 1988).

So, does this all translate to companies wanting to employee Narcissists, without readily acknowledging that Professional Narcissism can in fact be a positive trait, rather than one which conjures up the worst possible images?

Jeff, I truly appreciate your post and would like to offer you my experiences with the narcissist and change within my business. I had a boss who was a narcissist but could not see it in himself even after given many examples. He truly had dreams of being in control of everything and wanted everyone to admire how smart he was (Kinicki & Fugate, pg. 444). I had met him prior to him becoming my boss and I knew he was a Naval Academy graduate and for some reason, in my experiences they are either really good, thinking of others before themselves or really bad and they are the ultra narcissist. In this case I inherited the later. His bragging about how smart he was and his need to micro-manage everything became old very fast. The examples given

The benefits to profiling a leader’s personality from a distance are analyzing their motives and accomplishments. Motives encourage the way a leader accepts a leadership role; analyze future opportunities and threats of danger; and learning their satisfactions, stresses, frustrations, and vulnerabilities (Post 2006, 153). Assessing a leader’s motives is an important part of profiling a leader’s motives because they are subjected to distortion, deception, to include self-deception and rationalization. For these reasons, motives are often measured indirectly, through content analysis of people’s imaginative verbal behavior (Post 2006, 153). People that are driven by their accomplishments can control themselves and postpone rewards, for they

As a result, theorists such as House discussed that a person’s disposition might be considered stable over an extended period of time, but not necessarily for one’s lifetime. Hence, a leadership trait might predict one’s behavior in the short-run and such behavior usually has a long-term effect, but these findings were theoretical (House & Aditya, 1997).

In the past, narcissism has both positively and negatively influence companies’ success. Narcissism can be crucial in giving leaders the confidence to attempt new goals that others may not be willing to attempt, which can land massive success. Contrarily they may sometimes hinder the leader’s ability to keep the interest of stakeholders in mind, which can result in the destruction of relationships and ultimate failure of the individual and the company. This study suggests that humility can counter the negative effects of narcissism, increasing the chance for success. This allows the leader to be both, self-satisfying and courageous while allowing others

These traits are dangerous during a war, it may cost the lives of soldier in a war. In the world of business, if the leaders in a company have these bad traits, it may not cause death of people but are highly affected the daily lives of workers and customers.

“Dark side” leadership can cause significant harm to the organization and its members, yet individuals with these tendencies still reach positions of power due to the fact that dark side characteristics are hard to detect and easy to overlook. Dark side characteristics are described as undesirable characteristics that affect the relationship between leaders and followers and his or her success at creating a cohesive team (Hogan, Curphy & Hogan, 1994). They can include characteristics such as narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy (Harms, Spain & Hannah, 2011), moderate and functional versions of personality disorders (Hogan & Hogan, 2001) or more exaggerated form of bright side traits (Kaiser, LeBreton, & Hogan, 2015). However, these features are present along with other valuable capabilities (Hogan & Kaiser, 2005) and are unlikely to cause destruction without the right conditions and followers (Padilla, Hogan & Kaiser, 2007) which make it possible for individuals to reach top positions before any destructiveness is obvious.