Vulnerable narcissistic leadership meets Covid-19: the relationship between vulnerable narcissistic leader behaviour and subsequent follower irritation

ABSTRACT

Leaders’ vulnerable narcissism may cause followers irritation due to its antagonistic and neurotic nature. Based on conservation of resources theory, we propose and test a model of between-person and reciprocal within-person relations between weekly experiences of vulnerable narcissistic leader behaviours (VNLB) and followers’ irritation in subsequent weeks. We argue that in time of crisis and uncertainty, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns related to it, VNLB adds to follower irritation. We drew a sample from a population affected by workplace uncertainty, that is, the UK education sector during the first weeks of the Covid pandemic (N = 159). Five weeks of longitudinal data were collected. We conducted a random intercepts cross-lagged panel model and separated within- from between-person sources of variance in VNLB and follower irritation. Our findings show that VNLB positively related to follower irritation at the between-person level. The relationships at the within-person level of analysis were less clear. Experiences of VNLB resulted in follower irritation in subsequent weeks for some of the time lags, but not for others. We find limited indicators for a reciprocal relationship between VNLB and irritation. We discuss implications and link our findings to the study context of COVID-19 pandemic.

KEYWORDS:

• Leadership
• narcissism
• behaviour
• vulnerable narcissism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/1359432X.2023.2252130

Notes

1. Via the OSM there is a full 21-item version available, as well as a shortened 8-item version, with the latter being used in the present study. Items for the shortened version were chosen based on factor loadings and fit to weekly assessments. The shortened version correlated highly with the full version in the baseline survey (r = .93, p < .001).

2. As a robustness check, we repeated our RI-CLPM without including COVID-19 worry as control variable. Excluding COVID-19 worry produced similar results for the cross-lagged relationship between VNLB on irritation in subsequent weeks, such that there was a positive relationship for weeks 2 and 4. However, when excluding COVID-19 worry, we did not find a reversed cross-lagged effect of irritation on VNLB in any week.

Additional information

Funding

The research was funded by the Neoma Business School, Area of Excellence Future of Work as well as Exeter Business School.