Narcissism and Effective Crisis Management: A Review of Potential Problems and Pitfalls

Abstract

In the event of a crisis, effective leadership by senior officials plays a significant role in an organization's attempt to return to a state of normal operation. Effectiveness, however, can be hampered by a leader's behaviour and attitude towards colleagues, and other employees within the organization. This paper explores how narcissism and narcissistic leaders may affect crisis management within an organization. Using the literature from the American Psychiatric Association, crisis management, and leadership, this paper explores how personality disorders associated with narcissism may affect the pre-crisis, crisis, and post-crisis stages of crisis management. The paper concludes by offering suggestions on how to handle narcissistic leaders within an organization, and areas for future research.

Controlled Collaboration in Disaster and Crisis Management in the Netherlands, History and Practice of an Overestimated and Underestimated Concept

“…The explanation of the Act with regard to operational management shows straight away that the term operational leader is a contradiction in terms. Although many different insights exist as to what 'good' leadership means (Pearson & Mitroff, 1993;Boin, 't Hart, Stern, & Sundelius, 2005;King, 2007), a leader has always a certain type of power that enables him to impose his vision onto other actors, should it be necessary (de Bruijn & ten Heuvelhof, 1999). A leader is someone who sets the course and is in charge of other people: there is a mutually hierarchical relationship between the leader and the person or persons he is in charge of.…”

ERP Crisis Management Through Leadership Communication

“…For crisis management, sound leadership takes a proactive stance. Leadership communication focuses transferring the organization to normal operations (King, 2007). Relationships between leaders, employees, stakeholders, and external persons directly affect these activities.…”

“…Relationships between leaders, employees, stakeholders, and external persons directly affect these activities. King (2007) notes how a leader's attitude towards organizational personnel affects success. A leader carries their history of positives and negatives into a crisis.…”

Learning From Catastrophes and Leadership Thought

“…Leadership Thought: Tekin and Zerenler (2008) who express the struggles of minimizing the risk during the crisis, changing institution's culture in a positive direction and reducing the damage from the priorities of the leader, defends that leaders need to form their crisis teams and ensure they can accomplish their mission to build and able to anticipate crises. In order to be able to create strategies and procedures to overcome the crisis, and argued that a proper guidance and counselling should be able to be done in a crisis (Arslan, 2009 (King, 2007). In fact, it is hard to answer this exactly.…”

“…However, as an exception, conducted researches show that mostly two kinds of leaders come into prominence; one is the status quo leader who is bound to regime and aims regime to be saved, other is revolutionary leader who wants to change the system radically and bring a new system instead of it (Cuzán, 2003). Also, one of the common grounds of charismatic leadership approaches is, even if there is no necessity, the issue that organization is under stress, innovation, crisis or chaos simplifies showing up a new charismatic leader (King, 2007) (Davis & Gardner, 2012). Even more importantly, it is stated that the most active leaders come to light from charismatic leaders in a crisis period.…”