Department of Management

 

Date of this Version

Spring 2015

Document Type

Article

Citation

Published in Personnel Psychology 68:1 (Spring 2015), pp. 1–47; doi: 10.1111/peps.12072

Comments

Copyright © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Used by permission.

Abstract

Past empirical studies relating narcissism to leadership have offered mixed results. This study integrates prior research findings via meta-analysis to make four contributions to theory on narcissism and leadership, by (a) distinguishing between leadership emergence and leadership effectiveness, to reveal that narcissism displays a positive relationship with leadership emergence, but no relationship with leadership effectiveness; (b) showing narcissism’s positive effect on leadership emergence can be explained by leader extraversion; (c) demonstrating that whereas observer-reported leadership effectiveness ratings (e.g., supervisor-report, subordinate-report, and peer-report) are not related to narcissism, self-reported leadership effectiveness ratings are positively related to narcissism; and (d) illustrating that the nil linear relationship between narcissism and leadership effectiveness masks an underlying curvilinear trend, advancing the idea that there exists an optimal, midrange level of leader narcissism.

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