Hubristic leadership: A review Eugene Sadler-Smith*, Vita Akstinaite, Graham Robinson and Tim Wray Surrey Business School University of Surrey * Corresponding author: Eugene Sadler-Smith, Surrey Business School, University of Surrey, Guildford GU2 7XH, UNITED KINGDOM. Email: e.sadler-smith@surrey.ac.uk
When Hubris Syndrome was proposed it is noteworthy that Owen and colleagues symptomatized it in terms of “disproportionate concern with image and presentation”, “excessive in the individual’s own judgement”, “exaggerated self-belief, bordering on a sense of omnipotence, in what they personally can achieve”, “loss of contact with reality; often associated with progressive isolation” (Owen and Davidson, 2009, p.1398, emphases added). Implicit in Owen and Davidson’s symptomology for Hubris Syndrome is the issue of how the strength of any particular hubristic behaviour translates into maladaptive outcomes. This in turn begs questions such as: how much concern with image should be considered ‘disproportionate’; how much confidence is ‘excessive’; how would we know that our leader’s self-belief has become inappropriately ‘exaggerated’; or how broad is the range and scope of the ‘reality’ with which we should expect our leaders to maintain contact? In conceptualizing hubris a context-dependent, over-developed strength (see: Kaplan and Kaiser, 2006) taking account of the setting in which the potential hubrist and the leadership decisions she or he takes are situated is vital. Indeed in making recommendations for the mitigation of hubris it is difficult to overstate the importance of acknowledging the context in which leaders and the top management group (e.g. the board) take their decisions. We believe that it is impossible to understand hubris, let alone mitigate its effects, without seeing it as embedded within the organization’s executive and governance structures and the effects this relationship has on performance (see: Tang, Crossan, and Rowe, 2011). Given that there is a “swell of opinion” that boards of directors collectively are partly to blame for business failures (Mellahi, 2005, p.261) it is not clear why boards themselves fail to detect warning signals of the potentially damaging effects of CEO hubris and if, and when they do detect the early signs of impending failure, why in many cases they appear to be passive. There are parallels with, as well as lessons to be learned from, so-called high-reliability organizations (HROs), i.e. “organisations that are able to manage and sustain almost
Nonetheless, the admission in Leahy’s popular management book Management in 10 Words that “hubris is a common fault and one I hope to avoid” (Leahy, 2013, p.3) was, in the light of events, a telling observation. Leahy’s self-exhortation further bolsters the imperative for developing viable means for recognizing and researching hubris in both its extant and nascent forms (see below). Hubris as a process The shortcomings of traditional approaches whereby leadership is viewed as something possessed or done by ‘the leader’ have led researchers to conceptualise leadership couched in terms of a processual view (see: Hernes, 2014; Langley, Smallman, Tsoukas and Van de Ven, 2013). Tourish (2014) mooted a processual and communicatively-oriented view of leadership as a “fluid process of co-orientation and co-construction between myriad organisational actors, whose ‘essence’ varies between each occasion of its occurrence” (p.88). Likewise, building on complexity theory ,“a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being” , Uhl-Bien et al (2007) argued that leadership is an emergent event comprised of the interactions of heterogenous agents and numerous forces. From a processual view leadership is not a process that is caused by different ‘things’ (social entities or substances) with indicative attributes, rather it is a process that evolves creatively through time as a result of intersecting activities and events. Processual research has the potential to illuminate how phenomena such as leadership achieve stabilities and form patterns through time (Langley et al, 2013). As such processually-informed hubris research offers the possibility for novel insights into how various forces and flows produce the temporal patterning commonly associated with hubristic leadership. Such an approach would not focus entirely on the formally assigned leader (e.g. a CEO) or their attributes; instead it would focus on all those involved in the process of leadership. Theorising hubristic leadership as a processual phenomenon obviates the
narcissism” rather than a medical syndrome by using the analogy that just like height is not a medical syndrome but extreme height can cause medical problems (p.101). Although Owen and Davidson’s (2009) symptomology has proven useful, criticisms have been levelled at the abstractedness and indeterminacy of some of the 14 symptoms (see Russell, 2011). A further issue stems from the fact that more than half of the symptoms overlap with other personality disorders and this raises the question as to how particular combinations of the symptoms capture hubris accurately and uniquely. An important step in the development of hubris research is the empirical demarcation of hubris and Hubris Syndrome from similar and related constructs, including overconfidence, core self-evaluation, pride and narcissism (see Table 1). Aside from the clinical approach, researchers have developed other means by which incipient hubris may be recognised and thereby raised the possibility for intervention and prevention. However, one of the methodological challenges that hubris (along with narcissism) researchers face is the practical necessity of researching a phenomenon which has its locus in small number of high-profile individuals who may be reluctant to engage in data collection especially in relation to a phenomenon that is perceived to be negative. These particular aspects of hubris mean that it may often only be possible to access it via measures. Aside from traditional scaling and measurement techniques (e.g. Li and Tang, 2013) one viable at-a-distance approach is based on the assumption that a leader’s behaviour and cognition is predisposed by their personality which is then reflected in their natural language use (). Hence the “personality transition seen in Hubris Syndrome” (Garrard, 2016, p.138) which results in hubristic behaviours, may become evident in spoken and writen discourse utterances and manifest in various micro-scale linguistic features (; Garrard Rentoumi, Lambert, and Owen, 2014). These so-called ‘linguistic markers’ (sometimes referred to as
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