From Research to Coaching Practice
All I need is a stage to shine: Narcissists' leader emergence and performance. Barbora Nevicka, Annebel H.B. De Hoogh, Annelies E.M. Van Vianen, Bianca Beersma, Doris McIlwain, The Leadership Quarterly 22 (2011) 910-925
Special thanks to Brodie Gregory, PhD for reviewing this research and translating the key points to use in your coaching practice.
If you’ve coached or worked with organizational leaders, chances are that at some point in your career you have encountered a narcissist… or perhaps many narcissists. What is it about the co-occurrence of leadership and narcissistic characteristics? In their August 2011 article, Nevicka et al investigate the relationship between leader emergence and narcissistic personality characteristics, as well as the role that context plays in this relationship.
Context matters, as the right situation can allow narcissists (or those with narcissistic characteristics) to really “shine” and exercise their influence and charisma. These authors found that narcissists emerged as leaders more often than those classified as non-narcissists. They also found that teams with narcissistic leaders performed worse on two important aspects of team effectiveness: communication and individual decision making. Applied broadly, we may interpret this to mean that teams with narcissistic leaders may have diminished performance because of less effective communication and decision-making processes.
In terms of context, the authors looked at reward interdependence of the teams – or the extent to which team members were reliant on one another for important rewards. They found that when teams were highly reward interdependent, narcissists in leadership roles performed better, and team members shared more information and helped each other more. The takeaway? If you have a narcissistic leader, build in a requirement of interdependence and teamwork in order for valued rewards to be attained.
Want to learn more? Take a look at Nevicka and colleagues’ Leadership Quarterly article. Given their resistance to feedback and criticism, narcissistic leaders can make for very difficult clients. How can you use Nevicka et al.’s work to help narcissistic clients be more effective with the teams or organizations that they lead?
