Leadership Emergence

What it is

Leadership research asks two different questions that are easy to blur. The first is emergence: when a group has no appointed leader, or when people compete for a role, who comes to be seen as the leader and who is chosen. The second is effectiveness: whether the people led perform better, or whether observers judge the leader to have done the job well. A person can score high on one and low on the other, and a study that measures only one can be quoted as if it measured both.

Grijalva and four colleagues built their 2015 meta-analysis in Personnel Psychology around that separation. Earlier studies linking narcissism to leadership had produced inconsistent results, and the authors set out to integrate them. They made four contributions. They kept emergence and effectiveness apart. They tested whether leader extraversion accounts for the link between narcissism and emergence. They compared effectiveness as rated by observers with effectiveness as rated by the leaders themselves. And they tested for a curved relationship between narcissism and effectiveness, rather than assuming a straight line.

The findings follow the four questions. Narcissism was positively related to emergence, and leader extraversion appeared to explain that link. Narcissism showed no relationship with effectiveness when the raters were supervisors, subordinates or peers. Self-rated effectiveness, by contrast, rose with narcissism. And the absence of a straight-line relationship with effectiveness hid a curved one, which the authors read as evidence for an optimal, moderate level of narcissism in a leader.

The term is a descriptive label from leadership research and not a coinage of this publication. The sources used for this page do not name who first drew the line between emergence and effectiveness, so no originator is given.

In effect

In research: narcissism and the leader's role

The Grijalva meta-analysis is the clearest case in the evidence this publication has checked. Narcissism predicted who emerged, extraversion explained why, and observers who rated the resulting leaders did not find them more effective. The one place narcissism and effectiveness rose together was in the leaders' own ratings of themselves. The article Do Dark Triad Traits Help at Work uses this result to separate being picked from performing.

In everyday life: how a group picks someone

The following is an illustration of the distinction and not a reported case. A committee needs a chair and nobody has been appointed. The person who speaks first and most confidently tends to be treated as the natural chair. Whether the committee then works better under that person is a separate fact that the early impression does not settle. The extraversion finding gives one reason the early impression and the later result can diverge: confident, sociable behaviour draws the role, and it is a different thing from running a group well.

In commerce: selection and appraisal

Any organisation that promotes on visible leadership behaviour is relying on emergence. The meta-analysis does not study promotion decisions directly, so it cannot say how often this goes wrong. What it does supply is a question to put to a selection process: is the measure one that predicts who gets noticed, or one that predicts how the people led perform, and who is doing the rating?

What it does not say

It does not say that narcissistic people make poor leaders. The meta-analysis found no linear relationship between narcissism and observer-rated effectiveness, which is different from a negative one, and the authors read a curved pattern behind it.

It does not say that emergence is a flaw. Someone has to take the role, and a trait that helps people get chosen is not thereby harmful.

It does not say that extraversion is the whole story. The finding is that extraversion appeared to explain the narcissism and emergence link, and it concerns narcissism specifically.

It rests on a meta-analysis read at abstract level for this publication, not on full text, and the leadership measures in the underlying studies vary. Treat the result as an association across many samples, not a mechanism.

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