Self-serving Leaders Research Articles

When Leadership Goes Wrong: Self-Serving Shepherds and their Followers

In Christian business circles, leadership is usually viewed positively. After all, we have as an example the best leader in human history, Jesus Christ. The Bible describes how to lead effectively, but it spends more time warning against people who abuse the power that comes with a formal leadership role. The negative fallout from this abuse is considerable. Abuses of leadership are easy to find in the business world. How should Christian business people respond? After reviewing the literature on self-serving leaders and examining what Scripture

Bad apples spoiling the metaphor? How and why self-serving leaders stir up counterproductive behaviors at work.

Self-serving leaders satisfy their self-interests at the cost of both employees and organizations, leading to declining organizational competitive advantage and performance. Drawing upon the affective events theory (AET), we constructed and examined a theoretical model of self-serving leadership influencing counterproductive work behavior (CWB), where traditionality plays a significant moderating role through the lens of anger as a mediator. Data were collected in three waves using a survey questionnaire distributed in three industries located in the Southwest district of China. Hierarchical regression analyses were conducted on a sample of 316 employees to test the hypothesized research model. The results showed that self-serving leadership triggers employee anger, which in turn causes CWB. Furthermore, traditionality plays a significant moderating role, in which employees with higher levels of traditionality feel less anger and show less CWB. Overall, research findings have clarified how and why self-serving leadership affects employees' emotions (such as anger) and behavior (such as CWB), bringing new insights into the self-serving leadership and employee behavior literature. Research implications on the management of self-serving leadership, limitations, and future recommendations of research are also discussed.

Who Benefits? How Ingroup Prototypes Shift Follower Impressions of Self-serving Leaders

Much of the research on negative leader behavior focuses on the antecedents and consequences of said behavior; follower reactions are less understood. The present research explores how social categorization induces followers to support self-serving leaders. Building on social identity theories, we hypothesize that leader prototypicality leads followers to make inferences with respect to how much they expect to benefit (i.e., subjective expected utility) and this impact follower perceptions of the leader’s effectiveness and their willingness to support that leader. The results of two experimental studies and one correlational study support our hypotheses and stresses the importance of follower-centric perspective in understanding self-serving leader behavior.

The Limiting Effects of Inconclusive Gubernatorial Elections towards the Democratic Consolidation of the Nigerian State

Abstract Inconclusive (delayed) elections are fairly a common phenomenon in the practice of representative democracy. In Nigeria, however, they are occasionally allowed to happen and sometimes stage-managed to serve the calculated interests of power centres. Thus, this study inserted in the debate on inconclusive elections and democratic consolidation by investigating the limiting effects of inconclusive gubernatorial elections (IGEs) in Nigeria. The study argued that the Nigerian leaders learned during colonisation and inherited during decolonisation the warped conception of politics as a means of personal enrichment against its service-driven notion. Since the state activities revolve around its power and power is popularly acquired through elections, the election period in Nigeria becomes contentious and controversial or destructive and divisive with its undermining effects on democratic consolidation. The research follows a documentary approach and leverages the information explosion and availability that characterise contemporary times. The systematic examination of the literature shows that the duo of electoral malpractice and violence accounts for the contentious electoral credibility and voter participation (indicating democratic consolidation), leading to the rising IGEs in Nigeria. The findings suggest the imperative for immediate comprehensive electoral rectification to enthrone a renewed electoral system premised on digital election technology that will produce leaders with innocreative ideas and merits for purposeful leadership and good governance in Nigeria as self-serving leaders are disasters to any nation.

Who or what is to blame for the power paradox in society?

We vote for people who seem to be promising good leaders and somehow, they turn out to be terrible leaders. This tendency Keltner (2007) calls the “power paradox”. The moment people gain power or success or wealth, their characteristics of empathy, collaboration, open mindedness, fairness, and generosity vanish into thin air and we have to deal with impulsive and self-serving leaders. The experience of power thus damages leaders’ social intelligence. The author of this article asks: who or what is to be blamed for this power paradox? Keltner suggests that we need people with a focus on others, who have empathy, a giving personality, gratitude, and unifying stories. The author suggests that spiritual intelligence can fix the power paradox in society as she shows that Keltner’s principles for enduring power are no different from the spiritual gifts explained in the Bible of Christianity. Spiritual intelligence is offered as the solution to the power paradox.

When Employees Retaliate Against Self-Serving Leaders: The Influence of the Ethical Climate

Leaders have been shown to sometimes act self-servingly. Yet, leaders do not act in isolation and the perceptions of the ethical climate in which leaders operate is expected to contribute to employees taking counteractive measures against their leader (that is, employees’ desire for retaliation, and supervisor-directed deviance). We contend that in an ethical climate employees feel better equipped to stand up and take retaliation measures. Moreover, we argue that this is explained by employees’ feelings of trust. In two studies using different methods (an experimental study and a multi-source study), we predict and find evidence that the relationship between self-serving leader behavior and employees’ desire for retaliation and supervisor-directed deviance is stronger when the ethical climate is high rather than low. Moreover, we show that trust in the leader mediates these relationships.

Boardroom Culture: An Argument for Compassionate Leadership

In this paper I present an argument for introducing compassion into the boardrooms of large corporations. A series of corporate scandals and failures have led the UK’s government to investigate what has been going wrong in some large corporations. These investigations have identified destructive corporate cultures emanating from greedy and self-serving leaders in boardrooms. Problems in the economic and corporate system in which lack of trust is paramount point towards a need for change. Our economic landscape has also shifted from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy bringing about changes from industrial models and economies of scale towards a global, digital and more creative and changing economy that focuses on continuing innovation. The old ways of running a company are no longer appropriate and we require different skills and characteristics in our CEOs. Increasingly, it is becoming necessary to adopt a more compassionate way of running businesses. CEOs need to be more emotionally and socially intelligent. Compassion is a potentially progressive way forward in the world of business. It is already recognised in the medical world – the NHS has an embedded culture of compassion. Corporate actors might also learn from feminist ideals of caring and compassion that could provide direction for developing compassionate leadership models. Some progressive corporate leaders have shown the potential for successful alternatives. Already in law there is a recognised role for compassion in numerous fields which may signal some new approaches to be adopted in the company law and corporate governance context.

Grave Consequences of Lack of Strategic Plan at the Highest Level of Government: S.P. as a Defense Against the Malice of Short-Sighted and Self-Serving Leaders

This paper explores the implications of strategic Planning at the macro level by the US government in order to archive strategic long-term goals. While in the present tumultuous global environment, political, economical, social, and security areas that make planning more formidable and challenging and call for some kind of “built-in flexibility” in the plan as well as continuous environmental scanning using the state of the art technology, the need for strategic plan is felt more than ever at the highest level of government. In the absence of such plan, the bulk of government efforts will be focused on dealing with existing problems and finding short-term solutions that while necessary, prevent from having a more in-depth long-term perspective on strategic issues confronting the country causing problems that if not resolved, will jeopardize the country and the world in the future. Such short-term perspective will also encourage short-sighted leaders to sacrifice long-term essential goals at the expense of short-term achievements that attract less informed voters helping them to stay in office and satisfy their own whims and egos. This paper will look at the grave consequences of lacking the strategic plan at the highest level of government, i.e. the chief executive office (the presidential office) for achieving long-term strategic goals without interference by wishy-washy leaders holding high offices for short period of times that otherwise, may create damages that are not either repairable or hard and costly to correct, thus derailing the society from a sound and systematic pathway of progress. Example of strategic issues like ignoring long and even medium term consequences of environmental changes, economic and trade relationship with other countries that due to globalization demands an integrated network, ignoring international accords that lead to cooperation, collaboration among nations are addressed including a model for an effective and well designed strategic plan (SP) needs to be put in place using the state or art SP technologies that include a modified and expanded version of Balanced Score Card (BSC) within a systems framework.

Followers’ Reactions to Self-Serving Leaders: The Influence of the Organization’s Ethical Climate

Followers’ Reactions to Self-Serving Leaders: The Influence of the Organization’s Ethical Climate

Walls or Bridges: "No Gobbledygook": The International Psycho-Oncology Society 2017 Sutherland Award Lecture.

Illness, health, and wellness happen in social contexts. The present political environment is highly divisive and plays to the most primitive fears of people. Never have the stakes been so high. History is replete with putative leaders who create walls that separate people in ways that inevitably leads to dehumanization, suffering, and eventually violence. Timely and openly shared psychosocial insights by experts in mental health into the evil consequences of "wall builders" are essential to the physical, mental, and spiritual health of individuals and nations. For health care professionals (in particular) to ignore the dangers posed by the ill equipped self-serving leaders who now dominate the news and exploit the dark psyche of the world stage would be at the very least unethical and at worst collusion in repeating the sins of the past. This article first recognizes the impact of leaders who, at great personal costs, have built bridges (with relentless compassion and courage) where only chasms existed before. Although international politics may seem like a universe away, in which people may (erroneously) feel powerless to influence change, our home health care settings can be dramatically improved and humanized by the application of universally accepted humanistic values. Health care, as it is practiced today, is an anachronism at multiple levels. Supportive care in general and psychosocial values specifically offer a more inclusive and realistic alternative. Based on an inclusive staff leadership model, a strategic, hands-on, practical, and compassionate approach to creating and implementing supportive care programs of excellence is described. Finally, potentially fruitful areas in which supportive care and psychosocial values can provide leadership as bridges to more accessible, affordable, and humanistic care are provided for contemplation.

Followers’ reactions to self-serving leaders: the influence of the organization's budget policy

Purpose– Even though leaders often are seen as responsible guides, they sometimes behave in a self-serving way, for example, by spending the company's budget on their own, frivolous needs. In this study, the authors explore an aspect of such behavior: the authors examine how an organizational budget policy makes such spending more legitimate in the eyes of followers. Specifically, the authors examine when followers will react to a leader's self-serving behavior as a function of: the role of organizational budget policies, and whether followers are directly affected by the leader's behavior. The authors test two particular budget policies, i.e. carry-forward vs non-carry-forward (a.k.a., “use-it-or-lose-it” budget policies), which differ on whether a department/team's allocations not spent by the end of the fiscal year flow back to the central administration. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approach– Study 1 is a multi-source field study that should enhance the external validity of the results. Study 1 was analyzed with regression analyses and bootstrapping techniques. To be able to draw causal inferences, the authors also conducted an experimental study (Study 2).Findings– Followers react more negatively – by showing increased turnover intentions and decreased commitment and cooperation – to a leader's self-serving behavior in a carry-forward policy than in a use-it-or-lose-it budget policy. Thus, organizational policies, such as the budget policy, affect how followers react to self-serving leaders.Originality/value– The authors focus on self-serving leader behavior. The authors show that followers’ reactions to self-serving leaders are not necessarily negative and are influenced by the specific organizational context in which the self-serving behavior occurs. More specifically, the authors add to the literature by introducing budget policies as influencing followers’ reactions to leaders’ behavior.

The role of employees' OCB and leaders' hindrance stress in the emergence of self-serving leadership

Media reports on self-serving leadership primarily focused on the negative consequences of such behavior for employees. However, much remains to be understood about the antecedents of self-serving behavior of leaders. In the present research we explore the role of employees' organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) in the emergence of self-serving leadership. Using one multi-source field study and three experiments, we showed that employees' OCB towards coworkers (OCBI) negatively impacted self-serving leadership. Moreover, we also examine the underlying mechanism for this relation. Results indicate that employees' OCBI mitigated leaders' hindrance stress, which mediates the relationship between OCBI and self-serving leadership. As such, our findings indicate that self-serving leaders are not necessarily inherently bad and that employees have an important role in shaping leaders' self-serving behavior.

Serving the Self From the Seat of Power

Why do some leaders use their position to amass personal prestige and resources, and others to benefit the team, the organization, or society? This article synthesizes new, cross-disciplinary research showing that self-serving leader behavior is predictable based on the function and nature of power—an essential component of leadership. First, because power increases goal-oriented behavior, it amplifies the tendency of self-focused goals to yield self-interested behavior. Self-focused goals may arise from a variety of sources; evidence is reviewed for the role of traits (e.g., low agreeableness), values (e.g., self-enhancement), self-construal (e.g., independence), and motivation (e.g., personalized power motivation). Second, because power is generally desirable, leaders whose power is threatened (e.g., self-doubts, positional instability) will turn their focus to maintaining that power—even at others’ expense. These ideas have important implications for research and for organizational efforts to develop leaders who will improve others’ outcomes rather than merely benefit themselves.

My Share Is Fair, So I Don’t Care

In the present research we argue that despite leaders’ self-serving actions, followers can still perceive them as being fair and thus ethical. First, we developed a scale to capture followers’ perceptions of their leaders’ self-serving behavior. Second, in a field study we showed that even though leaders may act self-servingly, if employees perceive their own outcomes as fair (i.e., ethical), they will not see much harm in the leader’s behavior. Finally, in a third study (a scenario study) we replicated the findings of our second study and examined the process underlying the proposed relationships. More specifically, we revealed that people experience increased uncertainty in the face of a self-serving leader and that distributive justice helps them deal with the emotional consequences of these feelings of uncertainty. In sum, our findings indicate that people care less about a self-serving leader as long as their share is fair.

The Servant Leader: A Higher Calling for Dental Professionals

The dental profession is guided by normative principles that provide guidance to our leaders and practicing dentists in addressing the needs of patients and the profession, yet there is room for incorporating new ideas that help dental professionals meet their professional obligations. The purpose of this essay is to discuss the concept of "servant leadership," especially in contrast with "self-serving leaders," and to suggest that servant leadership is consistent with the high ethical and professional ideals of the dental profession. The servant leader is the antithesis of the self-serving leader, who incessantly seeks more power and acquisition of material possessions. The servant leader's highest priority is the people (patients/students/customers) he or she serves. The concept of the servant-leader can take us away from self-serving, top-down leadership and encourage us to think harder about how to respect, value, and motivate people and ultimately provide better service to our patients.

Politics, democracy and the media: Case studies in Fiji, Tonga and the Solomon Islands

This article looks at three South Pacific Island nations—Fiji, Tonga and the Solomon Islands—in terms of some landmark changes occurring in their political arenas. Fiji, beset by racial and political problems culminating in three coups, is experimenting with a multiracial, multiparty cabinet that could be emulated by other multiethnic countries. Tonga, a Polynesian monarchy, has recently seen an unprecedented number of protest marches against the ruling elite, the death of its King, and is in experiencing palpable democratic changes. In the Solomons, the strong desire for a fairer political system was manifested in the 2006 riots in Honiara. It caught the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI) napping and brought into question the sufficiency and focus of Australia’s intervention policy in the country. The media has been a key player in these events. Regularly accused of adding fuel to fire in its coverage of crises, the media faces constant government pressure in all three countries. This article argues that rather than the media, the sources of discontent and instability are self-serving leaders clinging to outdated political systems. The authors believe political reform, not media control, is needed.

Distinguishing Between the Facilitating and the Self-Serving Charismatic Group Leader

Winnicott informed us about the components of the facilitating environment. Kohut warned us to differentiate between the charismatic leader, who looks for enfeebled followers to further his own grandiose ambitions, and the idealizable leader whose actions are based on a sense of values. Findings from attachment theory and neurobiology indicate how specific developmental issues make for a perfect fit between the self-serving charismatic leader and those who have been deprived of attuned interactive regulation and secure attachment in early childhood. This article attempts to integrate the above ideas for application to group dynamics in therapeutic, supervisory, training, and institutional groups.

Ethical Challenges in the Leader-Follower Relationship

Abstract:Leadership and followership are unified in an interdependent relationship exemplified by the idea of teamwork. Ethical concerns are among the valuational elements essential to developing loyalty and trust in this relationship. However, because of their need to maintain power and distance, self-serving leaders may become detached from how their actions are perceived and reacted to by followers. This pattern can be especially damaging to teamwork when leaders continue to receive disprortionate rewards despite their poor performance, especially when coupled with organizational downsizing and layoffs. Implications are drawn regarding the ethics of equity, responsibility, and accountability in the exercise of authority and power.