Hubris and narcissism overlap, and although extant research explores relationships between them in terms of characteristics, attributes, and behaviours, we take a different view by analysing their differences in relation to power and leadership. Drawing on a psychology of power perspective, we argue that narcissistic and hubristic leaders relate to and are covetous of power for fundamentally different reasons. Using the metaphor of intoxication, hubrists are intoxicated with positional power and prior success, but for narcissists, power facilitates self-intoxication and represents a means of maintaining a grandiose self-view. Unbridled hubris and narcissism (i.e. searching for and facilitated by unfettered power) have important ramifications for leadership research and practice. Leadership discourse, preoccupied with and predicated on positive aspects of leadership, should assess these two potent aspects of leadership because misuse of power by hubristic and narcissistic leaders can create conditions for, or directly bring about, destructive and sometimes catastrophic unintended outcomes for organizations and society.
This study addresses the inconsistency of contemporary literature on defining the link between leadership styles and personality traits. The plethora of literature on personality traits has culminated into symbolic big five personality dimensions but there is still a dearth of research on developing representative leadership styles despite the perennial fascination with the subject. Absence of an unequivocal model for developing representative styles in conjunction with the use of several non-mutually exclusive existing leadership styles has created a discrepancy in developing a coherent link between leadership and personality. This study sums up 39 different styles of leadership into five distinct representative styles on the basis of similar theoretical underpinnings and common characteristics to explore how each of these five representative leadership style relates to personality dimensions proposed by big five model.
Prior research has established a positive link between chief executive officer (CEO) narcissism and firm innovation. Notably, research shows that CEO narcissism is positively related to more radical innovation and breakthrough technologies, that is, manifestations of a firm's exploration orientation, and positively related to more incremental innovation, that is, manifestations of firms' exploitation orientations. However, it primarily examines these orientations in isolation or neglects their interplay and thereby ignores insights from organizational learning theorists that firms and managers face decisive tradeoffs between fundamentally distinct exploration and exploitation orientations. This overlooks the possibility that narcissistic CEOs may emphasize exploration over exploitation, and vice versa, to gain visibility, affecting the balance between those orientations. Consequently, we might draw incorrect conclusions about how CEO narcissism affects firms' innovation. Drawing on theoretical mechanisms from the narcissistic personality literature, we develop and test a competing logic that connects CEO narcissism with firms' relative exploration orientation, that is, firms' exploration relative to the exploitation orientation. In addition, we theorize on and investigate the moderating effects of accounting-and market-based performance feedback that may alter narcissistic CEOs' attention to exploration or exploitation and, hence, affect the relationship with firms' relative exploration orientation. We test our hypotheses using panel data from 120 firms in the Standard and Poor's 100 index between 2008 and 2018, covering the personality profiles of 224 CEOs. Our findings indicate that CEO narcissism is negatively associated with firms' relative exploration orientation, that is, narcissistic CEOs emphasize an exploitation orientation. Furthermore, this relationship is pronounced with firms' increasing relative accounting-based performance and attenuated with firms' increasing relative market-based performance. We draw theoretical and managerial implications from these insights.
The board of directors’ behavioral dynamics can strongly influence an entrepreneurial firm’s success. Drawing on the behavioral theory of corporate governance, this study identifies and tests factors that facilitate behavioral integration in boards of high technology start-ups. We unpack the black box of board behavior with primary data collected from a survey-based sample of 149 CEOs of Norwegian high-tech start-ups supplemented by quantitative archival information. We find that intra-board behavioral integration (i.e., board members’ propensity to clearly understand one another’s issues and needs, actively solve, and share relevant information and resources) is positively affected by greater levels of informal communication between CEOs and board members. Next, we find that inter-board trust (i.e., board members interact with absolute integrity, tell the truth at meetings, trust one another, and keep mutual promises) mediates this relationship such that higher levels of inter-board trust result in greater concordance between information communication frequency and inter-board behavioral integration. We then examine the role of an efficacious board chair who motivates and uses each board member’s competence, formulates proposals for decisions and summarizes conclusions after board negotiation, and chairs board discussions without promoting their agenda, finding that efficacious board chair leadership moderates the relationship between informal communication frequency and intra-board trust. We discuss the implications of these findings for the theory and practice.
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