Why Are There So Many Narcissistic Leaders? Subordinates Don’t Give Them Negative Feedback

Abstract

Narcissists fill many prominent leadership positions even though they often do not perform better than non-narcissists and they have a leadership style that their subordinates do not like. Why is this this case? We hypothesized that negative feedback makes leaders want to quit and that narcissistic leaders do not receive as much of this discouraging negative feedback from their subordinates as non-narcissistic leaders do. We tested these hypotheses across a series of studies. In Study 1, we found that leaders who received negative feedback were less likely to want to continue in their current leadership roles or take on new leadership roles as compared to leaders who received positive feedback. The discouraging effect of negative feedback occurred for both more and less narcissistic leaders. In Studies 2 and 3, subordinates said that they would be less likely to provide negative feedback to a narcissistic manager than a non-narcissistic manager because they thought that the narcissistic manager would be less likely to be receptive to their concerns. Taken together, these results support our hypotheses and provide evidence that subordinates may be unwittingly forcing out the non-narcissistic leaders they would prefer to have by providing them with more negative feedback.