NEW YORK, July 18 — A person with narcissistic traits tends to take charge when placed in a leaderless group of strangers, but that initial appeal often fades once group members become familiar with the individual’s pattern of behaviour, according to a study published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. The finding offers a window into how narcissistic leadership emerges and why it can prove so durable, even when it ultimately undercuts the people it is meant to lead.
Narcissistic leadership is defined as leadership exercised by a person exhibiting unyielding arrogance, self-absorption, and a personal egotistic need for power and control and admiration. It is a dynamic that has drawn the attention of psychoanalysts for more than a century.
Sigmund Freud considered what he called the “narcissistic type” especially suited to act as a support for others, to take on the role of leaders, and to impress others as being personalities. He noted that another person’s narcissism attracts those who have renounced part of their own — a psychological exchange that can bind followers to a leader in ways that defy logic.
The book Narcissism: Behind the Mask outlines four basic leadership types: authoritarian with task-oriented decision making; democratic with task-oriented decision making; authoritarian with emotional decision making; and democratic with emotional decision making. Narcissists, according to the book, are most commonly found in the authoritarian emotional type, though they may also appear in the authoritarian task-oriented type.
These categories help explain why such leaders are often perceived as decisive and commanding in the short term, even as their deeper motivations remain self-serving.
Corporate narcissism and the codependent circle
Psychoanalyst Michael Maccoby has observed that psychoanalysts do not usually get close enough to narcissistic leaders, especially in the workplace, to write about them. That distance may be one reason why the phenomenon of corporate narcissism has been slower to surface in organisational research. Psychologist Alan Downs describes corporate narcissism as a situation in which a narcissist becomes CEO or occupies another senior leadership role and then assembles a group of codependents to support the narcissistic behaviour.
Such leaders profess loyalty to the company but are primarily committed to their own agendas. The result: organisational decisions come to be based on the narcissist’s interests rather than those of the organisation, its stakeholders, or society at large.
This pattern can allow a charismatic leader to run a financially successful company on thoroughly unhealthy principles — for a time. The performance metrics may look good, but the culture beneath them can become toxic. Neville Symington has suggested that one of the ways to differentiate a good-enough organisation from a pathological one is through its ability to exclude narcissistic characters from key posts.
That is a tall order when the very traits that make a narcissist attractive as a leader — confidence, decisiveness, a commanding presence — are also the traits organisations tend to reward in hiring and promotion.
Healthy versus destructive narcissism in management
Analyst Roy Lubit has compared healthily narcissistic managers with destructively narcissistic managers in terms of long-term organisational impact. The distinction matters: a certain degree of narcissism may fuel ambition and resilience, but when the destructive form takes hold, the costs ripple outward — through turnover, eroded trust, and decisions that serve the leader’s ego rather than the mission.
The study from Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin suggests that groups eventually recognise the pattern, but by then the narcissist may already be entrenched, surrounded by codependents and a structure that reinforces the behaviour. For the people working in such environments — employees, middle managers, boards of directors — the human stakes are real.
A leader who demands admiration and control can stifle innovation, create a climate of fear, and drive talented people out the door. The research points to a sobering reality: the very qualities that help a narcissist rise to power are the same qualities that, left unchecked, can damage an organisation from the inside.
What remains to be seen is whether organisations will take Symington’s advice seriously enough to build screening processes and governance structures that keep destructively narcissistic leaders out of key posts — or whether the allure of the charismatic authoritarian will continue to win out, one leaderless group at a time.
