Dark Side Leadership: The Rise Of Dark Side Leadership

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“Dark side” leadership can cause significant harm to the organization and its members, yet individuals with these tendencies still reach positions of power since dark side characteristics are hard to detect and easy to overlook. Dark side characteristics is describe as undesirable characteristics that affect the relationship between supervisors and followers and his or her success at creating a cohesive team (Hogan, Curphy & Hogan, 1994). They can include characteristics such as narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy (Harms, Spain & Hannah, 2011), moderate and functional versions of personality disorders (Hogan & Hogan, 2001) or more exaggerated form of bright side traits (Kaiser, LeBreton, & Hogan, 2015). However, these features are …show more content…

Certain conditions may foster dark side leadership and make it easy for these traits to thrive, a change in the setting may turn previously effective traits to turn into dark side traits or new pressure in the environment can trigger dark side traits. Pech and Slade (2007) stated that organizations with highly bureaucratic structures encourage individuals with dark side traits to rise as it makes it difficult for subordinates to oppose bad leadership behaviors and encourages obedience. Additionally the authors also suggests that complex organization structures keep decision makers removed from the individuals they are promoting, creating difficulties in gaining full awareness of what truly goes on and the destructive characteristics these individuals possess. This permits individuals to rise in the organization as long as they reaching the goals, regardless of their methods. As Giblin (1981) put forward, in a complex organizational environment “…the importance of the professional’s knowledge and ability will become secondary to social skills required…to move oneself through the…environment,” (p. 23) which would allow highly manipulative, charismatic and narcissistic individuals to …show more content…

As said by McCall et al. (1990), “some executives who eventually derailed moved up during mergers or reorganizations, a time when performance is particularly hard to measure,” (p. 25). The quote points out that dark side leadership emerging during instability is able to take advantage of the situation to gain power. In these times dark side traits such as imaginativeness, boldness and mischievousness, may have been what was needed to provide a clear vision or a new direction helping the organization pull through, however once the situation changed these behaviors became harmful to its effectiveness. Perhaps the slowed pace of a stable environment permitted the surrounding people to see the strain being put on the subordinates by the dysfunctional side of leadership that was once

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