In my Leader Lab article entitled “Is a Narcissistic CEO Good for Your Organization?” I reported the results of an extremely well done research article on the relationship between CEO narcissism and company performance. The bottom line was a company run by a narcissistic CEO did not outperform a company run by a non-narcissist, so why trust the future of your company to one of these folks?

The way the researchers measured narcissism was really slick. They could not administer the CEOs of the 111 computer software and hardware companies a narcissistic personality test, so they had to rely on publicly available information to evaluate this trait. They looked for indicators of narcissism in the manifest decisions CEOs made about aspects of their public image that they could influence. These unobtrusive measures of narcissism developed by the researchers might be even more effective indicators of CEO narcissism than a personality test.

Recall from my previous article that narcissism has the following four dimensions:

• Exploitativeness/Entitlement: I deserve respect, and insist you give it to me

• Leadership/Authority: I love to be the center of attention

• Superiority/Arrogance: I am better than others

• Self-absorption/Self-Admiration: I truly am extraordinary and special

The unobtrusive measures of CEO narcissism developed by the researchers and the corresponding dimensions of narcissism they represent are as follows (pp. 363-365):

1. Prominence of the CEO’s picture in annual reports

• Leadership/Authority – I am the central figure in this company

• Self-absorption/admiration – I enjoy the visibility that comes with being CEO

• Entitlement – I deserve to be showcased

2. CEO prominence in press releases

• Leadership/Authority – I am the central figure in this company

• Self-absorption/admiration – I enjoy the visibility that comes with being CEO

• Entitlement – I deserve to be showcased

3. First-person singular pronouns in interviews

• Leadership/authority – leadership is a solo endeavor, not a group activity

• Superiority/arrogance – the company and I are synonymous

• Entitlement – I deserve to be showcased

4. CEO pay relative to that of the second highest paid executive

• Superiority/arrogance – I am, by far, the most valuable person in the organization

• Entitlement – I deserve far more compensation than anyone else in this organization

These four items produced a surprisingly valid and reliable measure of CEO narcissism. Ok, so your CEO might be a narcissist if:

• Your CEO’s photo in the annual report is of him or her alone and occupies more than half a page
• Your CEO insists on being mentioned by name numerous times in positive press releases
• Your CEO uses first-person singular pronouns (I, me, mine, my, myself) significantly more than he or she uses plural pronouns (we, us, our, ours, ourselves)
• Your CEO’s cash and non-cash pay is significantly and unusually higher than that of the second highest paid executive

If it looks like a narcissist, and it sounds like a narcissist, it just might be a narcissist. Don’t expect your CEO to see these traits in himself, or for that matter to even care what you or anyone else might think.

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From an interpersonal perspective, we already know the answer to that question is no. Narcissists suck to work for, but do they lead the organization to better levels of performance than less narcissistic leaders?

I present the evidence for that answer in my new post at The Leader Lab entitled “Is A Narcissistic CEO Good For Your Organization?”  The study I report on of 111 CEOs in the hardware and software industry was extremely well done and appeared in one of our best research journals.

Not only are narcissists jerks to work for, they are probably not worth the trouble. There is no evidence that a company run by a narcissist will outperform one run by someone that does not spend every waking moment absorbed with him or herself.

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Leader Lab: Seven Things To Expect From Your Narcissistic Employee

My post today over at The Leader Lab is entitled “Five Evidence-Based Outcomes of Both the Bright-side and the Dark-side of a Leader’s Personality.” This article is a follow-up to one I wrote last week entitled “Seven Things to Expect from Your Narcissistic Employee,” which was a big hit on SmartBrief on Leadership.

In this article, I summarize the results of a fascinating study of 75 Major League Baseball CEOs over a 100 year period, published in one of our top research journals. The bottom line is that narcissistic leaders are more likely to turn over good managers, while positive leaders are more likely to achieve outcomes associated with organizational success. That’s something many of us might have suspected, but it’s nice to have some credible evidence behind it.

I hope you check out the article by clicking here!

I am a huge fan of the Service-Profit Chain, which advocates that if you want to grow your business, you need to have loyal and satisfied customers, and satisfied and committed employees are the key to satisfied and committed customers. There is plenty of existing research to support these established links in the service-profit chain.

New research published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, one of our leading research publications, now suggests that the satisfaction and performance of the people that manage service employees also has a significant impact on the service-profit chain. As I discuss in the video, this new study of 306 store managers, 1615 service providing employees, and 57, 656 customers suggests that the performance and satisfaction of managers had direct effects on employee performance, customer satisfaction, and store revenue growth, in addition to the previous links between employee performance/satisfaction, customer satisfaction, and revenue growth.

Simply stated, my advice to companies based on this new research will now be you need to impress the socks off both your employees and the people that manage them directly if you want to impress your customers and grow your business. If you think you can impress your customers when your employees and their managers are disgusted with you, you are living in La La Land.

How you manage managers matters a lot if you want your business to thrive.

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The Service-Profit Chain

My inaugural post at the Leader Lab is entitled “Want Your Employees To Display Positive Emotions? The answer to that question is YES! if your business depends on delivering high quality service to customers. In today’s economy that describes most business.

In this post, I review a recent study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology that looked at how a positive service climate affected both employees and supervisors. The bottom line is that the more positive the service climate, the more likely it was that employees could display positive emotions and deliver high quality service. This study was especially interesting because it showed how emotionally exhausted supervisors could have a serious negative effect on emotionally exhausted employees when the service climate was poor.

The message to me is one I have repeated here often – partner with your employees to fix those crappy systems that keep them from impressing your customers. If you find yourself constantly blaming your employees when they display negative emotions at work, you need to take a very close look at this and other research on the power of a positive service climate.

Bad service is much more your fault than theirs.

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Leadership Integrity, Value Congruence, And Employee Engagement

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Are some people more likely to be engaged at work than others?

Yes, according to recent research. An important new study with the best evidence yet that employee engagement might indeed facilitate performance also suggests that value congruence, perceived organizational support, and core self-evaluation (CSE) might be engagement enhancers.

Core self-evaluation is a personality trait that represents an individual’s self-esteem, self-efficacy, emotional stability, and locus of control. Employees with a positive CSE had previously been shown to perform better, deal with adverse conditions, and just be more satisfied at work then those with a negative CSE.

This new link between CSE and engagement is significant because it’s the only suggested cause of engagement that a company or supervisor cannot directly control. Personality is relatively stable – we can’t change people’s personality at work so we shouldn’t even try.

The obvious suggestion from this new research on engagement is that we should try to hire people with a positive CSE. That’s easier said than done because the most common selection tool is an interview, and according to Robert Hogan, narcissists and psychopaths excel at interviews. Unfortunately, I find that most people do not even know how to recognize personality and distinguish it from other psychological states like attitudes, emotions, moods, and values. That is a big problem.

I like to listen for internal locus of control (LOC) and healthy self-esteem.

Someone with a healthy self-esteem can speak in a matter-of-fact way about both their strengths and weaknesses. They don’t embellish their strengths and don’t feel threatened to admit a weakness. They believe their strengths far exceed their weaknesses, and they pursue a strategy of exposing themselves to situations where they can excel and avoiding situations where they know they can’t contribute significant value.

Individuals with an internal LOC have a characteristic tendency to assume responsibility for the things that happen to them. Individuals with a more external LOC will always find something or someone else to blame when things go wrong. People with an internal LOC can see the systemic causes of their behavior, but they assume responsibility for taking action to change those causes so they don’t experience the same failure over and over again.  They don’t dump on their leaders (this sucks and so do you!); instead, they partner with them to fix the crappy system that was the main cause of the problem.

Do your best to hire, retain, and promote employees with a positive CSE. Learn what they value at work, and never expect them to behave in ways that would violate those values. Demonstrate your respect and care for them as individuals through interdependent relationships and supportive management practices.

This is a reasonable path to employee engagement. If you find yourself making excuses or blaming employees for their lack of engagement, take an honest look in the mirror at your own personality.

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A few days ago I blogged about how recent research suggests that value congruence – the extent to which employees can behave at work consistent with their own self-image – might enhance employee engagement. Employees are just not likely to fully invest their head, hands, and hearts in work they don’t find meaningful.

But employees also need to believe their work is manageable. This recent research also showed a link between perceived organizational support and engagement.

Individuals feel safe in organizational contexts perceived to be trustworthy, secure, predictable, and clear in terms of behavioral consequences….Individuals with trusting interpersonal relationships in supportive organizational environments are able to take risks, expose their real selves, and try and perhaps fail without fearing the consequences (Kahn, 1990)…Thus, supportive management and interpersonal relationships foster feelings of psychological safety that increases willingness to engage fully in work roles. (Rich, et al. 2010, p. 621).

Just to be clear, let me show you some of the questions the researchers asked employees in order to measure perceived organizational commitment:

• The organization takes pride in my accomplishments
• The organization really cares about my well-being
• The organization values my contributions to its well-being
• The organization strongly considers my goals and values
• The organization shows little concern for me (reverse scored)

Employees need support at work if they are expected to deliver the performance and citizenship that result from engagement. If employees believe they work for folks that don’t value their contributions or care about their well-being, they won’t feel safe enough to fully engage in their work.

I think this is ultimately a supervisory issue. If the organization is sincerely trying to provide this support to employees but discovers that individual supervisors are not fully “engaged” in the effort, those supervisors need to be developed or replaced. If you as a supervisor work for an organization that does not sincerely care about you or your direct reports, you should do your best to stop that “shit from rolling downhill” and provide those you have been given the privilege to supervise with as much support as you can.

As I’ve said a number of times, there is no substitute for caring. We now have some credible evidence for a link between caring, engagement, and employee performance.

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I blogged recently about new credible evidence that employee engagement might indeed affect employee performance. This is the best evidence we have so far that employee engagement produces tangible results, which is important because the hype surrounding engagement far exceeds the evidence. This new research also gave us a very specific definition of engagement, a new and better measure of engagement, and an evidence-based suggestion for three things that might enhance employee engagement.

One of the things this new research suggests enhances engagement is value congruence. Value congruence is the extent to which the individual can behave at work consistent with their own self-image. It’s very difficult to experience meaningfulness in our work if we are expected to behave in ways that are inconsistent with the highest values we espouse to ourselves and others.

When individuals find that their role expectations pull for behaviors that they feel are inappropriate for their preferred self-images, they feel devalued, taken advantage of, and less willing to give themselves to their work roles. (Rich, et al., 2010, p. 621).

This is where leadership integrity comes in. Leaders with integrity in the eyes of their employees speak and act in ways consistent with what employees value. The leader’s personal behavior reflects values congruent with employee values. As leaders inspire others to enact their best selves and stretch for higher and higher levels of performance, they never expect values to be compromised, and they never accept compromise in their own behavior or in the behavior of others they have been given the privilege to lead.

Find a disengaged employee and I’ll bet you will also find a leader lacking integrity.

Model the way for your employees by being open and clear about your values.  Then behave at work consistent with your values, and help your employees behave consistent with their values. Try not to hire and never promote people that are either void of or unwilling to make a public commitment to meaningful personal values. Partner with your employees to continuously improve the crappy systems that rob people of their pride of workmanship.

Don’t expect the engagement that flows from meaningful work to magically appear in others until you have the wisdom and courage to first do the right thing yourself.

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When you measure one thing and call it something else, it’s impossible to meaningfully interpret your results. Poor research design does not produce actionable knowledge.

As I pointed out in “Engagement Soup,” the Gallup Q12 does not measure engagement. Questions like “I have a best friend at work,” “There is someone at work who encourages my development,” and “At work, my opinions seem to count,” really indicate conditions that might cause engagement, but they do not indicate the degree to which any given employee is engaged or disengaged. These are good questions to ask for sure, but to ask them of your employees and then proceed to label your results employee engagement is misguided and irresponsible.

A good measure of engagement starts with a good definition of engagement as an effect manifest in the behaviors of employees at work. As I reported yesterday, one definition that meets that criteria is “the simultaneous investment of an individual’s physical, cognitive, and emotional energy in active, full work performance.”  Armed with this very specific definition, you could then proceed to identify indicators of the extent to which employees exhibit this physical, cognitive, and emotional energy at work.

A good measure of engagement must not confound its causes with the effect.

Questions like “I work with intensity on my job,” (physical engagement) “I feel positive about my job,” (emotional engagement) and “At work, my mind is focused on my job,” (cognitive engagement) accomplish the goal of measuring employee engagement because they are effect indicators that do not in any way attempt to provide knowledge about why someone might manifest this intensity, positiveness, and focus in their behavior at work. Knowledge of what might cause someone to think, feel, and behave this way must come from an entirely different set of questions, questions like “I know what is expected of me at work,” (Q12).

And you cannot assume that because the cause is present that the effect will also be present. Sorry, but the only way to really know about the effect is to measure it separately and directly. And establishing that the cause actually produced the effect is very difficult, especially in complex social systems.

If you claim to be measuring engagement in your workplace, are you tapping causes, effects, or a mix of both? If you don’t know the answer to this question or don’t understand why it’s important, then your are wasting your time.  Even if you don’t know it, I guarantee you that your employees do.

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I’m a big fan of the concept of employee engagement but I’ve also been very skeptical of how both big consultants and my own academic community have treated it so far. We’ve been told to believe that the link between engagement and profitability is a slam dunk, but because of poor research design, this very difficult cause-effect link has really never been established.

I’m very happy to say that a recent article in the Academy of Management Journal provides the best credible evidence so far for a link between psychological engagement and employee performance. The article is entitled “Job Engagement: Antecedents and Effects on Job Performance,” by Bruce Rich, Jeffrey LePine, and Eean Crawford.

This well designed study of 245 firefighters and their supervisors found that job engagement was a significant predictor of both task performance and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). This is especially significant because job engagement was tested for its affect on performance and OCB simultaneously with job involvement, job satisfaction, and intrinsic motivation. In the presence of job engagement, these other important factors lost their significance.

The researchers defined job engagement as “a multidimensional motivational concept reflecting the simultaneous investment of an individual’s physical, cognitive, and emotional energy in active, full work performance” (p. 619). A simple way to remember this is “engagement involves investing the hands, head, and heart in active, full work performance” (p. 619).  Most importantly, this research gives us a new measure of engagement that is in my opinion the best available. This new measure of job engagement has 18 questions, 6 for each of the sub-dimensions of engagement: physical engagement (e.g. I exert my full effort to my job), emotional engagement (e.g. I feel energetic at my job), and cognitive engagement (At work, I focus a great deal of attention on my job).  Because this measure is non-proprietary, I predict we are going to see it used in a lot of research in the future, so our knowledge of a consistent conceptualization and measurement of job engagement is only going to get better.

They also identified three antecedents of job engagement: value congruence, perceived organizational support, and core self-evaluations, such that higher levels of these were associated with higher levels of job engagement. An important take-away is that the process of job engagement is heavily influenced by the selection process.  Look for employees with an internal locus of control, self-esteem (but not hubris), self-efficacy, and emotional stability. Be transparent about your organizational values and look for people that can help you enhance those values. To further enhance value congruence, provide mentoring, socialization opportunities, and management practices that align with your stated values. Finally, demonstrate support for the development of your employees by providing leadership training and meaningful developmental performance feedback. There is no recipe for engagement or performance, but these three tips are a good place to start.

This still does not prove that a company that does a better job of engaging its employees will outperform one that does not. That is very hard to establish; however, every organization should be focused like a laser on employee performance, and this research suggests that job engagement may be a significant key to performance.

And please don’t miss the fact that you can’t get engagement with wishful thinking. You get it with carefully designed selection, training, support, and performance feedback systems. If you find yourself lamenting that your employees don’t appear engaged, you are going to have to do something different.

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