Narcissistic Leaders

The latest statistics tell us that Mary Trump’s hit piece on her uncle Donald is a runaway best seller. Trash talking Trump seems to be the royal road to serious money. 

Her book’s success is also a cultural symptom. It manifests our absurd trust in the pseudoscience of psychiatric diagnosis. Guess what-- Mary Trump believes that her uncle is a narcissist. In truth, so does Yale psychiatrist, another nitwit, named Bandy X. Lee. As you know, Dr. Lee has been offering up her diagnoses of Trump for a couple of years now.

As noted recently on this blog, narcissism is a dubious diagnostic category to begin with. According to these lesser lights of our medical profession, narcissism is a really bad quality to have in a leader. And naturally, everyone agrees, because what do people know anyway.

Anyway, for those who care to see some serious research in the field of leadership studies, we turn to a study from China, authored by Kong Zhou. Based on a study of managers and staff in a Chinese factory the Zhou and his colleagues discovered that narcissism is a positive quality in leaders. If you had known nothing but the shrill rants of Mary Trump and Bandy X. Lee, you would never have guessed.

Psypost has the story, summarizing a 2018 study from Psychological Reports.

Much of the psychology literature has considered the trait of narcissism to be a “dark” trait, characterized by self-centeredness, feelings of superiority, and the tendency to exploit others. New research by Kong Zhou and colleagues, however, suggests that narcissism has a positive side, too.

This dark triad is well known in the field. How many of these qualities are more likely to be found in human beings of the male persuasion. Recall that little Mary Trump is making a fortune explaining that Uncle Donald is not in touch with his feelings.

Zhou has shown the advantages of narcissism in the workplace. More narcissism means more proactive. More narcissism means more energy. More narcissism means taking more initiatives and taking charge more often:

Zhou and team propose that narcissism is linked to proactive behaviors in the workplace, through employees’ levels of energy on the job. “We argue that narcissistic employees usually have stronger internal motivations to release the potential energy stored in their bodies as to prove they are better than other employees. Hence, we predict that narcissistic employees may be more energized to exhibit taking-charge behavior in the workplace,” the researchers say.

And,

As expected, employee narcissism was positively related to supervisor ratings of how often employees took charge at work. As the authors reason, narcissists may be especially proactive at work since they typically believe they are smarter and more powerful than others, and accordingly feel more capable of taking charge. Furthermore, they likely feel particularly motivated to take initiative since these actions show off their success.

And,

Narcissism was also positively related to employees’ reported level of energy at work. The authors say, “narcissistic employees might have more psychological resource (e.g., perceptions of superiority over others and excessive demand for admiration) to make themselves feel energized at work.”

Furthermore, the more authority the narcissist had, the higher he had risen on the corporate hierarchy, the more energy he had for his job:

Interestingly, it was found that the relationship between narcissism and energy at work was stronger in employees who ranked higher within the company — those who were in managerial positions over nonmanagerial positions. Similarly, the relationship between energy and taking charge was stronger in managers than nonmanagers. The authors infer that hierarchy may be important when it comes to seeing the positive outcomes associated with narcissism in the workplace.

In short, the psycho professionals who trot out the diagnosis of narcissism to attack the president, have no idea what they are talking about.

Note that the Chinese study appeared in 2018-- which would have given both women time to read it and learn from it. They did not do so. Their competence rises to the lever of using pseudoscience to slander and defame… which is their true talent, aside from gossip.