Emily Grijalva
Emily Grijalva is the first author of a 2015 meta-analysis in Personnel Psychology on narcissism and leadership. With Peter Harms, Daniel Newman, Blaine Gaddis and R. Chris Fraley, she separated leadership emergence from leadership effectiveness and found narcissism positively related to emergence, explained by extraversion, and unrelated to effectiveness as rated by observers.
Who they are
Grijalva is a researcher whose paper on this site synthesises earlier studies of narcissism and leadership. The sources read for this publication are the paper's abstract and its publisher and repository records, which give the study and its five authors but no biography. This page states no institution or career history for that reason.
The paper has five authors and its conclusions are theirs together. The site credits the first author, following the house rule.
Key papers
Narcissism and leadership: A meta-analytic review of linear and nonlinear relationships (Grijalva, Harms, Newman, Gaddis and Fraley, 2015), Personnel Psychology, 68(1), 1-47. doi:10.1111/peps.12072.
The authors began from the observation that earlier studies of narcissism and leadership were inconsistent. They integrated them with four aims: to separate emergence from effectiveness, to test whether extraversion explains the emergence link, to compare observer ratings with self-ratings of effectiveness, and to test for a curved relationship.
Key ideas
Emergence and effectiveness are different outcomes. Narcissism was positively related to leadership emergence, meaning who ends up in the role, and showed no relationship with leadership effectiveness. See Leadership Emergence.
Extraversion appears to explain the emergence link. The authors report that leader extraversion accounts for narcissism's association with emergence, which is a reason the confident, sociable behaviour that draws the role should not be read as evidence of skill in running a group.
Who does the rating matters. Observer-rated effectiveness, from supervisors, subordinates and peers, was unrelated to narcissism. Self-rated effectiveness rose with it.
A curved pattern sits behind the flat line. The authors read it as evidence for an optimal, moderate level of leader narcissism. This page reports their interpretation as theirs.
Limits of what was read. The page rests on the abstract and repository records, not the full text, so effect sizes and the shape of the curve are not reported.
Sources
- Grijalva, E., Harms, P. D., Newman, D. A., Gaddis, B. H., & Fraley, R. C. (2015). Narcissism and leadership: A meta-analytic review of linear and nonlinear relationships. Personnel Psychology, 68(1), 1-47. doi:10.1111/peps.12072. Read at the abstract via a university research repository.