Narcissists are Bad Leaders

Narcissists may think they'd make for good bosses, but several studies show that their preoccupation with themselves hinders their performance.

 The following is a summary of several research studies emphasizing the dysfunctional aspects of narcissists in leadership positions.

 Study 1: Although narcissists have leadership-related qualities, such as confidence, authority and high self-esteem, their self-centeredness ultimately prevents them from partaking in the creative exchange of information and ideas, which is crucial in group decision-making situations, the researchers at the University of Amsterdam said.

 The team divided 150 participants into groups of three, with one person in each group randomly assigned to be the group's leader. The groups then had to choose a job candidate. Researchers shared 45 items of information about the candidates, with some of the tidbits disclosed to everyone in the group, and with each participant receiving one piece of information not shared with other group members.

 All the subjects were told they could contribute advice, but that the leader was responsible for making the final decision. Researchers designed the experiment so that if each person shared the candidate information shared exclusively with them, the group would make the best choice. If the group made the decision based only on the information shared with everyone, they would be more likely to select a lesser candidate. After the experiment, participants completed questionnaires, with the leaders receiving questions designed to measure narcissism. The other group members answered questions designed to assess the group leader's authority and effectiveness.

 Participants also indicated how much information they knew, indicating the level of sharing that went on in the group.

The groups led by the greatest egotists chose the worst candidate for the job. "The narcissistic leaders had a very negative effect on their performance," study researcher Barbora Nevicka said in a statement. "They inhibited the communication because of self-centeredness and authoritarianism."

 But despite their poor performance, group members rated the most narcissistic leaders as the most effective. "Narcissists are very convincing," Nevicka said. She added, "Communication — sharing of information, perspectives, and knowledge — is essential to making good decisions. In brainstorming groups, project teams, government committees, each person brings something new. That's the benefit of teams. That's what creates a good outcome."

 Study 2: The Culture of Narcissism.

The construct of cultural narcissism has been with us for decades, most notably in the work of cultural historian Christopher Lasch (The Culture of Narcissism, 1979). Cultural narcissism is reflected in TV shows and song lyrics, as well as widespread tendencies toward vanity, materialism, entitlement, and fame-seeking. We have documented increases in a range of these cultural markers; these changes are typically larger than the increases in individual narcissism.

 They can be self-centered, arrogant or cocky. They seem charming at first, but later turned out to be intensely self-absorbed. They may be supremely confident in their abilities but turn out to be incompetent — and blame other people for their failures.

 Narcissists must perform a variety of mental and social gymnastics to protect their grandiose views of themselves. They seek attention and admiration. They build splashy, often exaggerated profiles on Facebook. They play games in relationships. And they lash out at anyone who criticizes them.

 But can an entire culture be narcissistic? Evidence points to that very trend, placing narcissism in the category of an epidemic — a disease spreading at a higher rate than usual.

 Evidence for Increasing Narcissism Among Individuals

Studies of narcissism have looked at the prevalence of the trait from both developmental and generational perspectives. A 2008 study of a nationally representative sample of US citizens used interviews to assess lifetime prevalence of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), the most serious form of individual narcissism. The researchers found that Americans in their 20s were three times as likely as people over age 60 to have experienced NPD in their lifetimes.

Another approach compares real-time self-reports of narcissism among similar-aged people, such as college students, across several decades. This keeps the results from being skewed by age or distorted memory. These studies also show increasing narcissism. Traits related to narcissism have also increased. For example, younger generations are more likely to:

·     rate themselves as above average on leadership and drive to achieve;

·     score lower on measures of empathy;

·     embrace life goals centering on money, fame, and image;

·     set unrealistically high goals; and

·     report higher levels of self-esteem.

The tendency to focus on the self, and to “show off,” is in many ways becoming a social norm.

Other Cultural Evidence

In fact, some people are setting themselves apart through their offspring. Drawing from 325 million names from the Social Security Administration database, we found that the names parents give their children are becoming increasingly unique. In the 1940s, about one in three boys had one of the top 10 most popular names; today that number has shrunk to one in nine (Twenge, Abebe, & Campbell, 2010). In fact, in many circles — particularly among celebrities — it’s no longer fashionable to use names as names. In June 2013, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West named their daughter North. Actress Gwyneth Paltrow and her husband, musician Chris Martin, have a daughter named Apple.

Another target of research has been pronoun usage. In both the corpus of 5 million books housed by Google and the lyrics of Billboard Top 10 songs, the use of first person singular (I, me, mine) has grown, while the use of first person plural (we, us, our) has declined. Many other data points show a similar pattern.

·     Medical cosmetic procedures, including surgeries, have increased dramatically since the 1990s.

·     Houses have expanded to encompass more rooms for individual activities.

·     Religion has become much more personal, with increases in the popularity of ”prosperity theology,” “cafeteria” style religions, and individual reports of direct experiences with the divine.

Consumer culture also illustrates the spread of self-focus, whether it’s watching a barista at Starbucks taking a five-step custom order, people sitting around a restaurant table with each on his or her iPhone, or a customized pizza restaurant like YourPie.

In a sense, narcissism is the dark side of individualism — freedom without responsibility, relationships without personal sacrifice, and positive self-views without grounding in reality.

What comes next? How will narcissism further evolve? In order to maintain elevated self-views in a world with the standard economic and social pathways blocked, individuals will need to migrate into other social realms that are less constrained by reality. For example, individuals could move to online social realities where they can succeed (e.g., social networking, gaming, Reddit), fantasy or “geek” subcultures (e.g., science fiction, live action role-playing), or other alternatives. In essence, growing income inequality in the real world could lead a population of narcissists to feed their self-views in fantasy cultures.

 Study 3: Researchers aggregated a variety of studies on the subject, and found that while narcissists are more likely to garner leadership positions, there was no evidence of a link between narcissism and a leader’s success.

 More specifically, the study found that the poorest leaders are those with either extremely high or extremely low levels of narcissism.

“Our findings are pretty clear that the answer to the question as to whether narcissism is good or bad is that it is neither. It’s best in moderation,” said psychological researcher Emily Grijalva of the University of Illinois, the lead author of the study. “With too little, a leader can be viewed as insecure or hesitant, but if you’re too high on narcissism, you can be exploitative or tyrannical.”

Peter Harms, assistant professor of management at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a co-author of the study, said those with moderate levels of narcissism have achieved “a nice balance between having sufficient levels of self-confidence, but do not manifest the negative, antisocial aspects of narcissism that involve putting others down to feel good about themselves.”

Harms, who has conducted extensive research on maladaptive traits in the workplace, said that the idea that narcissism can be a double-edged sword is not new.

“(Narcissists) are usually very good in short-term situations when meeting people for the first time. But the impression they create quickly falls apart,” he said. “You soon realize that they are nowhere as good or as smart as they say they are.”

Those in charge of hiring or promoting leaders for their organization should proceed with caution, he said.

“Narcissists are great in interview situations – if you can reduce a leadership contest down to sound bites, you will give them an advantage,” Harms said. “But as time goes on, they become increasingly annoying. At the personal level, they can be jerks. At the strategic level, they can take huge gambles because they’re so confident they’re right. They’re either making a fortune or they’re going broke.”

The researchers said the findings thus far show organizations should be wary of creating hiring and promotion practices that cater to narcissists’ strengths — but they should not assume the very low levels of narcissism make better candidates.

Grijalva said more research is needed to determine if narcissists function better in some leadership situations than others. The risk-taking and persuasiveness of narcissists may make them strong leaders in the midst of chaos, she said, but those traits could create problems in a more stable environment.

The study appeared in the journal Personnel Psychology. In addition to Grijalva and Harms, it was authored by psychological scientists Daniel A. Newman and R. Chris Fraley of the University of Illinois and Blaine H. Gaddis of Hogan Assessment Systems, a consulting firm specializing in personality assessment for hiring decisions.

 Study 4: Narcissists are Overconfident

 For leaders who have to make big decisions on behalf of their organizations, overconfidence can lead to disaster. Research has long shown that overconfidence – thinking we know more than we really do – hobbles our decision-making abilities. Overconfidence is such a destructive trait that Nobel Prize-winning APS Fellow Daniel Kahneman told The Guardian, “What would I eliminate if I had a magic wand? Overconfidence.”

 New research suggests that overconfidence is strongly linked with narcissism and is particularly likely to emerge when highly narcissistic people feel powerful. That is, a narcissistic boss who radiates feelings of superiority, entitlement, and a constant desire for admiration may also be more likely to make risky decisions.

Across four studies, a team of Georgia-based psychological scientists Lee A. Macenczak, Stacy Campbell, Amy B. Henley, and W. Keith Campbell found a relationship between narcissism and overconfidence: Higher narcissism went hand-in-hand with overconfidence. When highly narcissistic people were primed with feelings of power, they became even more overconfident in their abilities.

“Narcissists are especially prone to errors of overconfidence because they possess the following qualities: they think they are special and unique, that they are entitled to more positive outcomes in life than are others, and that they are more intelligent and physically attractive than they are in reality,” Macenczak and colleagues explain in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.

 In the first study, 135 participants (53% male, 80% Caucasian) completed the 40-item narcissistic personality inventory (NPI-40). For each item on the NPI-40, participants were shown two statements and had to choose the one they thought best described themselves (e.g. “I like having authority over other people” versus “I don’t mind following orders”).

After completing the narcissistic personality inventory, participants took a trivia test of 15 relatively difficult general knowledge questions. Participants chose the correct answer from two choices for each trivia question (e.g. “Which river is longer? The Mississippi or the Yangtze”).

After each trivia question, participants indicated how confident they were that their answer was correct by selecting a confidence level from 50% to 100%. Participants also estimated how many questions they answered correctly and how many questions other participants probably answered correctly.

“As expected the results indicated that narcissism is positively related to the different measures of overconfidence,” the researchers write.

In two additional studies, the researchers examined whether a sense of power would further push narcissistic participants toward overconfidence. Participants followed a similar procedure as in the last study, but this time they were prompted to feel powerful or not so powerful before taking the general knowledge quiz. In the high power condition, participants were asked to recall and write about a situation where they controlled another person or group, while those assigned to the low-power condition described a situation in which someone had power over them.

As in the first study, narcissism was found to predict overconfidence. However, prompting people to feel powerful didn’t seem to have a significant effect on overconfidence.

In a fourth study, the researchers ran the same power manipulation experiment but this time they used a sample that had been pre-screened for high levels of narcissism. In the pre-screening procedure participants answered the single-item narcissism scale (SINS) which relies on a single statement to assess narcissism: “I am a narcissist.” Participants rated themselves on a 7-point scale ranging from “not very true of me” to “very true of me” and only individuals responding with a 4 or higher were included in the experiment.

This sample of 250 individuals (64% female, 68% Caucasian) then completed the same procedure used in the previous experiments.

Consistent with the other experiments, “narcissism was found to be a significant predictor of each type of overconfidence.” When highly narcissistic people were primed to feel powerful, overconfidence rates rose even higher.

Overconfidence is not unique to narcissists or the powerful. In a 2004 review article published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, psychological scientists David Dunning, Chip Heath, and Jerry M. Suls reviewed the research on self-assessment. Based on their review, they come to a key conclusion: “When one looks at the accuracy of self-assessment in the workplace, from the office cubicle to the executive boardroom, one sees that people tend to hold overly inflated self-views that are modestly related to actual performance.”

To read more about the dangers of selecting and promoting narcissists to positions of leadership, read my article, “Our Obsession with Narcissistic Leaders.”