When Narcissistic Leaders dominate : Leader Narcissism, Group Performance and Group Context

Witnessing the high-profile ethical scandals in American businesses over the past decade, researchers have begun to consider the destructive potential of leadership. In seeking to understand the potential destructive outcomes of leadership, researchers have turned their attention to traits with negative connotations. Of these traits, narcissism have particularly close ties with leadership. Narcissism’s rise in popularity coincides with a larger trend in the field of organizational psychology toward building a more thorough understanding of negative workplace behaviors. Narcissists are likely to emerge as leaders in leaderless group discussions regardless of their individual performance on team tasks and are likely to be singled out as having leadership potential. Despite the growing body of literature focusing on the relationship between narcissism and leadership, no consensus has been reached regarding narcissism’s impact on leadership. In this study, I developed very seminal research questions about the effectiveness of leader narcissism and drawn hypotheses on these questions. Since the past results on this subject have failed to reach a certain consensus, I developed some explanatory suggestions about this results with adding two contextual variables as moderators in this relationship: Group cohesiveness and Group autonomy. With this research questions I suggested holistic research model to proceed with.