Transformational leaders challenge the status quo, provide a vision of a promising future, and motivate and inspire their followers to join in the pursuit of a better world. But many of these leaders also fit the American Psychiatric Association classification for narcissistic personality disorder. They are grandiose, entitled, self-confident, risk seeking, manipulative, and hostile. This article reviews the literature on narcissism and shows how what we think of as transformational leadership overlaps substantially with grandiose narcissism. As grandiose narcissists can appear as transformational leaders, it is important to distinguish between what leadership scholars have characterized as “transformational” and these “pseudo-transformational” candidates.

In spite of the importance of organizational culture, scholarly advances in our understanding of the construct appear to have stagnated. We review the state of culture research and argue that the ongoing academic debates about what culture is and how to study it have resulted in a lack of unity and precision in defining and measuring culture. This ambiguity has constrained progress in both developing a coherent theory of organizational culture and accreting replicable and valid findings. To make progress we argue that future research should focus on conceptualizing and assessing organizational culture as the norms that characterize a group or organization that if widely shared and strongly held, act as a social control system to shape members’ attitudes and behaviors. We further argue that to accomplish this, researchers need to recognize that norms can be parsed into three distinct dimensions: (1) the content or what is deemed important (e.g., teamwork, accountability, innovation), (2) the consensus or how widely shared norms are held across people, and (3) the intensity of feelings about the importance of the norm (e.g., are people willing to sanction others). From this perspective we suggest how future research might be able to clarify some of the current conflicts and confusion that characterize the current state of the field.

Although some researchers have suggested that narcissistic CEOs may have a positive influence on organizational performance (e.g., Maccoby, 2007; Patel & Cooper, 2014), a growing body of evidence suggests that organizations led by narcissistic CEOs experience considerable downsides, including evidence of increased risk taking, overpaying for acquisitions, manipulating accounting data, and even fraud. In the current study we show that narcissistic CEO's subject their organizations to undue legal risk because they are overconfident about their ability to win and less sensitive to the costs to their organizations of such litigation. Using a sample of 32 firms, we find that those led by narcissistic CEOs are more likely to be involved in litigation and that these lawsuits are more protracted. In two follow-up experimental studies, we examine the mechanism underlying the relationship between narcissism and lawsuits and find that narcissists are less sensitive to objective assessments of risk when making decisions about whether to settle a lawsuit and less willing to take advice from experts. We discuss the implications of our research for advancing theories of narcissism and CEO influence on organizational performance.

Studies of organizational culture are almost always based on two assumptions: (a) Senior leaders are the prime determinant of the culture, and (b) culture is related to consequential organizational outcomes. Although intuitively reasonable and often accepted as fact, the empirical evidence for these is surprisingly thin, and the results are quite mixed. Almost no research has jointly investigated these assumptions and how they are linked. The purpose of this article is to empirically link CEO personality to culture and organizational culture to objective measures of firm performance. Using data from respondents in 32 high-technology companies, we show that CEO personality affects a firm’s culture and that culture is subsequently related to a broad set of organizational outcomes including a firm’s financial performance (revenue growth, Tobin’s Q), reputation, analysts’ stock recommendations, and employee attitudes. We discuss the implications of these findings for future research on organizational culture.

The relationship between organizational culture and financial performance remains elusive even though researchers have studied it for some time. Early research suggested that a strong culture that aligns members' behavior with organizational objectives boosts financial performance. A more recent view is that, because strong cultures promote adherence to routines and behavioral uniformity, they are less effective in dynamic environments. We suggest that the relationship between culture and performance can be reconciled by recognizing that culture encompasses three components: (1) the content of norms (norm content); (2) how widely members agree about norms (culture consensus); and (3) how intensely organizational members hold particular norms (norm intensity). We hypothesize that "strong cultures"-where a high consensus exists among members across a broad set of culture norms-can contribute to better financial performance even in dynamic environments if norm content intensely emphasizes adaptability. We test this hypothesis in a sample of large firms in the high-technology industry. Firms characterized by higher culture consensus and intensity about adaptability performed better three years later than did those characterized by lower consensus, lower intensity about adaptability, or both. We discuss how parsing culture into content, consensus, and intensity advances theoretical and empirical understanding of the culture-performance relationship. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Narcissism is characterized by traits such as dominance, self-confidence, a sense ofentitlement, grandiosity, and low empathy. There is growing evidence that individuals with these characteristics often emerge as leaders, and that narcissistic CEOs may make more impulsive and risky decisions. We suggest that these tendencies may also affect how compensation is allocatedamong top management teams. Using employee ratings of personality for the CEOs of 32 prominent high-technology firms, we investigate whether more narcissistic CEO’s have compensation packages that are systematically different from their less narcissistic peers and specifically whether these differences increase the longer the CEO stays with the firm. As predicted, we find that more narcissistic CEOs who have been with their firm longer receive more total direct compensation (salary, bonus, stock options), have more money in their totalshareholdings, and have larger discrepancies between their own (higher) compensation and the other members of their team.