Twenty years on the dark side: Six lessons about bad leadership.

Abstract

Twenty years ago, Robert and Joyce Hogan introduced the concept of the dark side of personality as a way to understand incompetent management and bad leadership. The current article traces the development of this line of thinking and highlights 6 lessons learned from 2 decades of research inspired by it: how to define and assess the dark side of personality, the distinction between identity and reputation, the distinction between leadership emergence and leadership effectiveness, the dark side of charisma, the overlooked but pervasive problem of absentee leadership, and the crucial distinction between competition within groups versus competition between groups in the evaluation of leadership. The dark-side perspective helps correct a positivity bias in leadership research and provides insights for improving team, organizational, and national performance by minimizing the selection of the wrong people for leadership roles and enhancing the self-awareness and self-management of those in leadership roles. What's It Mean? Implications for Consulting PsychologyMainstream leadership research has suffered from a positivity bias by focusing on the desirable attributes of leaders to the neglect of the unpleasant reality than many leaders behave badly and cause great harm. This article enhances leader selection and leader development by summarizing six lessons learned in the 20 years since Robert and Joyce Hogan introduced the concept of the dark side of personality and leadership.

Bad Is Stronger Than Good

“…The original conceptualization of dark traits held that they might actually serve a useful purpose in the short term and only become maladaptive when applied too much or for too long (Harms & Spain, 2015). Put another way, low scores on dark traits result in getting overlooked, but high scores result in getting fired (Hogan et al, 2021). To that end, nonlinear relationships have been found between a number of dark traits such as narcissism and psychopathy with outcomes such as leadership effectiveness (Benson & Campbell, 2007; Grijalva, Harms, et al, 2015; Landay et al, 2019; Vergauwe et al, 2018) and sales performance (Titze et al, 2017).…”

“…These so-called dark traits (also referred to as subclinical traits or derailers) were thought to represent effective strategies for dealing with anxiety or advancing one’s agenda in the short-term, but which would produce negative social consequences when they were displayed either too much or too long (Hogan & Hogan, 2001). It was also believed that these characteristics would be more likely to manifest themselves under certain circumstances, such as when individuals were under great stress (Spain et al, 2016), distracted, or relatively unconcerned about the impression they are making on others (Hogan et al., 2021; Kaiser & Hogan, 2007). Compared with predominant models of personality such as the “Big Five,” dark traits have been argued to reflect rarer, often more sinister, and potentially more impactful characteristics which led to career derailment, terminations, conflict, lawsuits, and organizational failure.…”

Leadership Diagnostic: Unlocking Human Competence for Effective Strategy Execution

“…Despite unprecedented technological advancement, people remain the most important resource for businesses to achieve their goals. This is due to their competence to execute strategy in pursuit of business performance (Fayol, 1916;Barney, 1991;CIPD, 2018;Hogan et al, 2021). Competence refers to people's inborn need to master their environment.…”

Understanding dark side personality at work: Distinguishing and reviewing nonlinear, interactive, differential, and reciprocal effects

“…About 20 years ago, the concept of the dark side of personality was introduced as a way to understand incompetent management and bad leadership (e.g., Hogan & Hogan, 2001a; Hogan et al, 2021). Since then, dark side personality has rapidly become a productive area of research in Industrial‐Organizational (I‐O) psychology and management.…”