Narcissism, Core Self Evaluation and Sensitivity to Criticism on the Executive Level - How do Executive‘s Personalities and Anger Influence their Decision Making and Leadership Behavior?

Abstract

Upper Echelons Theory establishes relationships between individual executives, their behavior and firm outcomes. However, this stream of research suffers from approximating executive’s individual psychological traits via observable characteristics and neglecting interaction effects between personality variables, which limits the theory’s ability to convincingly explain executive behavior. The purpose of this chapter is to develop a personality profile of individual executive characteristics that are important in explaining decision making and leadership behavior. Developing this profile we define generalized self-efficacy, locus of control, exploitativeness/entitlement, leadership/authority, superiority/arrogance and selfabsorption/self admiration as reflecting the general level of positive self perception of an executive, while the levels of self esteem stability, emotional stability and sensitivity to criticism are decisive differentiators leading to either an overt or covert positive self perception. Consequently, we link these profiles to individual decision making comprehensiveness as well as authentic and pseudo-transformational leadership while introducing anger as an explanatory mechanism mediating this relationship.