Dysfunctional Leadership

Psychological Pressures

In the psychopathology of leadership, the combination of neurotic personality and personal power can—and almost inevitably does—create social and business disasters. Despite the potency of this shadow side, many leaders are unwilling to face it. They hesitate to look inside themselves, and when they do, they refuse to acknowledge their weaknesses; they are unwilling to face up to how their defensive structures and character traits can negatively affect their organizations. They are all too quick to deny that the pressures that come with leadership can contribute to dysfunctional behavior and decisions. The psychological pressures of leadership can be formidable, however, contributing to dysfunctional behavior to the detriment of both leader and organization. Among such pressures are:

• The loneliness of command. Once a man or woman reaches a top position in an organization, stress and frustration often develop as old relationships and support networks change and previous colleagues become distant.
• Addiction to power. The fear of losing what has been so difficult to gain—a top leadership position—sometimes motivates people to engage in malevolent acts.
• Fear of envy. Some people find being the object of envy very disturbing. That fear can reach the point where dysfunctional self-destructive behavior “snatches defeat out of the jaws of victory.”
• The experience of “What now?” After achieving a lifetime's ambition, leaders sometimes suffer from a sense of depression, feeling that they have little left to strive for.

All these psychological pressures may cause stress, anxiety, and/or depression, which may in their turn provoke irresponsible and irrational behaviors that affect an organization's culture and decision-making patterns (Kets de Vries 1993, 2001). But what lies behind them? Many of the [Page 369]pressures leaders experience derive from the ways they have learned to cope with the vicissitudes of narcissism.

The Role of Narcissism

Human development is shaped, in part, by responding to frustration. Before birth, human beings are, in effect, on automatic pilot: One's needs are met immediately and automatically. This situation changes the moment a baby makes its entry into the world. In dealing with the frustrations of expressing needs and wants, and to cope with feelings of helplessness, the infant tries to retain the original impression of the perfection and bliss of intrauterine life by creating both a grandiose, exhibitionistic image of the self and an all-powerful, idealized image of the parents (Kohut 1971). Over time, and with what psychiatrist Donald Winnicott termed “good enough parenting,” these two configurations are “tamed” by the forces of reality—especially by parents, siblings, caretakers, and teachers, who modify the infant's exhibitionism and channel the grandiose fantasies. How do the major caretakers react to the child's struggle with the paradoxical quandary of infancy—that quandary being how to resolve the tension between childhood helplessness and the “grandiose sense of self” found in almost all children? The answer is of paramount importance to the child's psychological health. The resolution of that tension is what determines a person's feelings of potency or impotency. Inadequate resolution often produces feelings of rage, desire for vengeance, and hunger for personal power. If that hunger is not properly resolved in the various stages of childhood, it may be acted out in highly destructive ways in adulthood.

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