leaderless groups have a natural tendency to elect self-centered, overconfident and narcissistic individuals as leaders
That is the finding of a
2008 study from Ohio State researchers.
A recent post of the Harvard Business Review Blog asks a great question...
Why do so many incompetent men become leaders?
While this certainly speaks to Republicans broadly...it also speaks to the political class, the media and certainly to Democrats.
While the HBR post is concerned with gender balance (important to be sure) it raises a more substantial question.
Lets talk about it for a minute
From the HBR post
That is, because we (people in general) commonly misinterpret displays of confidence as a sign of competence, we are fooled into believing that men are better leaders than women. In other words, when it comes to leadership, the only advantage that men have over women (e.g., from Argentina to Norway and the USA to Japan) is the fact that manifestations of hubris — often masked as charisma or charm — are commonly mistaken for leadership potential, and that these occur much more frequently in men than in women.
This is consistent with the finding that leaderless groups have a natural tendency to elect self-centered, overconfident and narcissistic individuals as leaders, and that these personality characteristics are not equally common in men and women. In line, Freud argued that the psychological process of leadership occurs because a group of people — the followers — have replaced their own narcissistic tendencies with those of the leader, such that their love for the leader is a disguised form of self-love, or a substitute for their inability to love themselves. "Another person's narcissism", he said, "has a great attraction for those who have renounced part of their own... as if we envied them for maintaining a blissful state of mind."
The truth of the matter is that pretty much anywhere in the world men tend to think that they that are much smarter than women. Yet arrogance and overconfidence are inversely related to leadership talent — the ability to build and maintain high-performing teams, and to inspire followers to set aside their selfish agendas in order to work for the common interest of the group. Indeed, whether in sports, politics or business, the best leaders are usually humble — and whether through nature or nurture, humility is a much more common feature in women than men.
There is so much Tea Party psychology to analyze from the proverbial arm chair.
But it seems to be that if an organization has a strong core purpose - governing, computing, teaching, serving etc...that is a leg up to having a more effective leadership.
But even beyond that, it seem to me, that the current mechanism that drives organizations towards "success" in ...elections, sales, output...all the modern metrics that outwardly show the world that you can exert your will and power over others always makes our purpose external to ourselves - our purpose it out there somewhere and it must be reached by our actions.
Our education system and our economic system have cultivated this habit - over there is worth and success and stability.
So we have this ever shifting mark to find our worth which makes our purpose not stable because there are always more elections to win and money to make.
It seems to me that if we want better leaders we need to have not only a strong core purpose but a less expansionary requirement to meet it...in that way we can cultivate the humility that our organizations require to actually serve us all.
Thoughts?