Narcissistic leadership is a common form of leadership. The narcissism may be healthy or destructive although there is a continuum between the two. To critics, “narcissistic leadership is driven by unyielding arrogance, self-absorption, and a personal egotistic need for power and admiration.”
Narcissism and groups
A study published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin suggests that when a group is without a leader, you can often count on a narcissist to take charge. Researchers found that people who score high in narcissism tend to take control of leaderless groups. Freud considered “the narcissistic type… especially suited to act as a support for others, to take on the role of leaders and to… impress others as being ‘personalities’.”: one reason may be that “another person’s narcissism has a great attraction for those who have renounced part of their own… as if we envied them for maintaining a blissful state of mind — an unassailable libidinal position which we ourselves have since abandoned.”
There are four basic types of leader with narcissists most commonly in type 3 although they may be in type 1:
- authoritarian with task orientated decision making
- democratic with task orientated decision making
- authoritarian with emotional decision making
- democratic with emotional decision making
Michael Maccoby stated that “psychoanalysts don’t usually get close enough to [narcissistic leaders], especially in the workplace, to write about them.”
Corporate narcissism
Corporate narcissism occurs when a narcissist becomes the leader (CEO) or a member of the senior management team and gathers an adequate mix of codependents around him (or her) to support his narcissistic behavior: “narcissistic leadership is about reproduced copies, not about originals.” This leads almost inevitably to a deterioration in the organization’s performance. “The narcissistic leader prefers the sparkle and glamour of well-orchestrated illusions to the tedium and method of real accomplishment.” Narcissists profess company loyalty but are only really committed to their own agendas, thus organizational decisions are founded on the narcissist’s own interests rather than the interests of the organization as a whole, the various stakeholders, or the society in which the organization operates. As a result, “a certain kind of charismatic leader can run a financially successful company on thoroughly unhealthy principles for a time. But… the chickens always come home to roost.”
Psychoanalysts have suggested that “one of the ways of differentiating a good-enough organisation from one that is pathological is through its ability to exclude narcissistic characters from key posts.”
Productive narcissists
Maccoby has distinguished what he calls “productive narcissists” from “unproductive narcissists”. Maccoby acknowledged that “productive narcissists still tend to be over-sensitive to criticism, over-competitive, isolated, and grandiose,” but considered that “what draws them out is that they have a sense of freedom to do whatever they want rather than feeling constantly constrained by circumstances,” and that through their charisma they are able to “draw people into their vision, and produce a cohort of disciples who will pursue the dream for all it’s worth.”
Others have questioned the concept, considering that “the dramatic collapse of Wall Street and the financial system in 2009 must give us pause. Is the collapse due to business leaders who have developed narcissistic styles”—even if ostensibly productive? Certainly one may conclude that at best “there can be quite a fine line between narcissists who perform badly in the workplace because of their traits, and those who achieve outrageous success because of them.”