You’ll likely agree that a key component of leadership is the ability to inspire others through charismatic personal magnetism. During times of crisis, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic, you especially need to be able to trust those who provide general guidance, reassurance, and updates. It could be the head of your organization sending out a video message, a national or regional politician, or a local religious leader.
You want to believe those in charge who deliver their words with aplomb. However, what if these are people whose past behavior has led you to conclude that their self-confidence is derived from a grandiose form of narcissism? Does it make you wonder if they have your best interests at heart or if they just seem to want the spotlight?
A key component of leadership is certainly the ability to inspire others to follow you, and this can require a healthy dose of positive self-esteem. The ability to withstand criticism, if not the public humiliation of losing an election, is just as important as leadership. Indeed, people running for the highest office in their country may fail on their first or second try.
Similarly, those seeking promotions at work may be rejected several times before they get the promotion they crave. You may have experienced the pain of losing the trust of those you want to lead if you lose an election to a committee in a voluntary organization. But despite your desire to try again, you can’t muster the self-confidence you need to try again. This makes you realize what it takes for people to put themselves on the line again and again. Unfortunately, the very qualities that can contribute to charismatic crowd-pleasers and the thick skin needed to survive a loss can require a certain degree of narcissistic grandiosity. In their study of workplace relationships, Nina Wirtz and Thomas Rigatti (2020) of Johannes Gutenberg-Universität suggest that leaders with a high degree of grandiosity may be able to rise to the top of their organizations but at the expense of those they lead, who feel emotionally exhausted and alienated from their work under leaders who exploit and take advantage of them.
As the German authors note, “On the one hand, narcissists are seen as charismatic and visionary, emerge more easily as leaders, possess the ability to persuade in public, and demonstrate good crisis management”…but “on the other hand, narcissism has been associated with lower levels of integrity, contextual and interpersonal performance, as well as workplace deviance.” In the workplace, their “sense of entitlement, lack of interest in interpersonal relationships, and strong emotional reactivity are likely to cause interpersonal difficulties” (p. 1). Moreover, for employees with the vulnerable form of narcissism, exposure to such leaders can be particularly stressful and emotionally draining.
Wertz and Rigatti suggest, then, that it is important to consider the intersection in leader-follower relationships between grandiose and vulnerable forms of narcissism. To test what they call the “holistic approach,” the authors administered measures of both types of narcissism, work engagement, and emotional exhaustion, or burnout, to a sample of 235 leaders across 71 workplace teams in several German industries. The results revealed that workers most susceptible to the grandiose leadership style of grandiose narcissists were those who themselves were high in vulnerable narcissism, riddled with self-doubt and perceived personal weakness. One conclusion from the German study is that not everyone will be negatively affected by a leader high in grandiose narcissism. For those who are, however, the workplace becomes a scene of constant stress and turmoil. However, if you think about what such situations look like in real life, you realize that seeing narcissistic leaders prey on the vulnerable creates an uncomfortable, if not toxic, environment for everyone else. According to Kenneth Nowak of Envesia Learning and Paul Zak of Claremont Graduate School (2020), this toxicity stems largely from a lack of empathy on the part of those in charge. Again, you can probably relate to this if you’ve ever seen a coworker being constantly belittled by a supervisor who seems indifferent to the detrimental effects this behavior has on the coworker’s self-esteem.
According to what Nauck and Zak refer to as the “empathy-altruism” hypothesis, a leader who translates his or her lack of empathy into a toxic interpersonal style creates “serious problems for employees, organizations, and society.” By contrast, altruistic leaders are able to empathize with others’ plight, show concern for others’ feelings, and take the perspective of those under their authority. This type of altruism requires that the leader puts the goals of the group ahead of the personal need to gain praise. Such leaders want those they lead to succeed not because it enhances their own image but because success benefits everyone. Among the “antidotes to empathy” they recommend are supporting and practicing a culture of appreciation, fostering an “empathy mindset,” and, even more radically, for organizations to “screen, select, and encourage empathy” (p. 6).
Returning to the example of the belittled coworker, an empathetic leader refrains from public shaming but instead seeks out a one-on-one conversation to try to help resolve the situation. Perhaps the coworker forgot to prepare the conference room for a scheduled meeting. An empathetic leader will try to understand why memory slips from the employee’s perspective. When workers feel that their bosses care about their feelings, they are more likely to remain loyal to the organization, feel more engaged, and even enjoy better physical and mental health.
Such interventions may have a beneficial effect due to changes in electrical activity in the brain. Michela Balconi and colleagues from the Catholic University of Milan (2020) used electroencephalography to measure what they call “interpersonal adjustment” among managers and employers. The Italian team asked a sample of 11 managers and their employees to role-play a performance review under two conditions of varying empathy while recording their EEGs.
In the low-empathy condition, managers gave their employees only a numerical rating, and in the no-rating, high-empathy condition, leaders used interpretations to provide a softer form of feedback on the employee’s performance. As we expected, the high-empathy condition produced EEGs that reflected greater synchrony between role-playing pairs as well as perceptions of greater emotional attunement and feelings of cooperation on the part of both team members.
If we now extrapolate these workplace findings to situations involving leadership in general, it seems clear that empathy can be a key component in ensuring that leaders’ actions have a positive impact on those they lead. Leaders who are obsessed with feeding their own narcissistic sense of self rather than understanding the plight of the average person fail to provide the reassurance needed to make those average people feel better about their situations and “interpersonally attuned” enough to persist despite whatever difficulties they may be facing. In short, since the process of becoming a leader may attract those who are already high in narcissism, a strong dose of “empathy antidote” may be needed for it to work. Given the qualities needed to rise to the top, finding these leaders can be difficult. And once you find them, they are the people who will ultimately have your achievement in mind.
