A Review at the Influence of Founders’ Narcissism on Enterprise Transformation Performance

Abstract

Narcissists tend to pursue leadership and are often selected as leaders by others. Nowadays, theoretical arguments clearly link narcissism and leadership, but the question whether leader narcissism is good or bad for organizations and their members remains unanswered. Further, what the influence is when the narcissistic leaders are founders of enterprise at the same time? Additionally, China is a traditional east country with high power distance, which make people there have a natural desire and respect for power. And this may magnify the effect of narcissism of founders on the enterprise and facilitate the research. So it is interesting to study the narcissistic leadership in private companies in China. For this paper, we used key words like “Narcissism”, “Founder”, “Narcissistic leadership” to search relevant articles in websites like Web of Science and found more than 100 pieces of articles. After analysis, we summarized the reasons of the birth of narcissistic leadership. And we found that research on the impact of narcissistic leadership on enterprise has turned from pure theoretical argument into case study. However there is no definite conclusion and some scholars take it as positive while others as negative. More and more scholars have called for a dialectical point of view on this topic and studied it in a particular context. In this context, firstly, we gave definition of narcissism and narcissistic leadership and summarized the cause of narcissistic leadership. Secondly, we introduced some methods measuring narcissistic leadership. Then, based on the definition, we introduced relevant research on the positive and negative influence of narcissistic leadership. Finally, we pointed out some possible directions for future research on the basis of the literature.