I hate authoritarian leaders. I deplore non-consultative decisions. I abhor domineering mentoring. I love my mom.
Well, I know you do too (good answer). Well again, don't all of us still recall the loving way in which our parents sat with us when we were children and requested us to have an equal say in family matters? Those wonderful memories of days before the exam when dad would wrap an arm around you and enquire softly if you wanted to study or to sleep. Every unforgettable evening when mom would sweetly ask what dish you wanted for dinner, and adorably cook the same, while telling you comfortingly not to worry about the dirt you just got in from the town dump yard. And your elder sibling handing you the TV remote every time you wanted to see your preferred flick.
No, right? I don't either. I have absolutely no memory of any day when my dad, mom, or elder sister did anything close to what I wrote above. Authoritarian, non-consultative, and domineering are the exact terms I would use to describe how I, the youngest child in the family, was treated. Actually, that would be a lie. Mom did cook absolutely lip-smacking dishes many-a-times whenever I had demanded. But dad, and consultative when I was a child?
I recall once, when I was marched to the local gym by my mother to find out a way to take off my teenage fat, I begged for a trainer who would be caring, affectionate, tender. The trainer my mom got me was a dominator, an oppressor, and a Godzilla (at this point, don't miss the super-innovative heading of this article).
I recalled this tyrant trainer again when I was building one of the largest construction projects in this nation. I used to visit the construction site regularly and every time noticed this foul-mouthed project engineer, shouting at the workers from morning till evening, not letting one feel-good moment permeate the construction site. I could see workers grumbling away and my labour contractors cribbing to each other about this hard taskmaster approach.
But intelligent as I am, I did not wait to let things go down -- and immediately got an engineer MBA from one of the most reputed B-schools with outstanding executive communication to be the project engineer. I was convinced that a good work environment at the labour site would ensure dramatic improvements in productivity.
After his joining, it took about a week for workers to strike work. When I reached the site, the main labour contractor came to me with a disappointed face. I asked him the reason, and he threw the question back at me, asking me strongly why I had changed the earlier project engineer. He said workers liked the previous engineer, as he used to drill up everyone's morning excitement with his loud-noised leadership, driving the team with his foul words to achieve deadlines, demanding furiously that everyone needed to work harder than they could, relentlessly. And that the new clean-shaven MBA project engineer was too soft and too collaborative for his construction labourers, “he asks us to decide our own targets every morning, and says this is the modern participative leadership style we'll have. Boss, if we have to decide our own targets and achieve them, why does he get a higher salary than we do?”
What's the right answer, then? A 2004 report released by Harvard Business Review titled Narcissistic Leaders -- The Incredible Pros states: “Many leaders dominating business today have what psychoanalysts call a narcissistic personality. That's good news for companies that need passion and daring to break new ground.” However, while this may be interesting, the wealth of research suggests this is possibly a wrong approach. A study published in the Journal of Business Ethics in 2020 found that narcissistic CEOs tend to engage in financial misreporting, which leads to lower firm performance (Gao & Li, 2020).
Another study published in the Journal of Management in 2018 found that authoritarian leadership style leads to lower market capitalization and profitability for firms (Jung & Yoo, 2018). A study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2019 found that narcissistic leaders create a toxic work environment that leads to decreased employee well-being (Lammers et al, 2019). A study published in the Journal of Business Research in 2018 found that narcissistic leaders prioritize their own interests over the interests of the organization, leading to lower product quality (Wang et al, 2018) and to decreased customer satisfaction (Gao & Li, 2020). A study published in the Journal of Business Ethics in 2019 found that narcissistic leaders are less likely to prioritize environmental sustainability, leading to decreased sustainability performance (Wang et al, 2019).
That's the paradox I am alluding to. While as corporate leaders, we promote the Simon Sinek groupthink of instilling synergetic harmony in decision making, promoting consonance with employees' aspirations, where happiness of workers supersedes the company's financial objectives, in our real lives, we are beholden to the boss approach.
But truly, do you believe that the choices you would have made in your life would have been superior if your parents had encouraged collaborative decision-making? Would you now be better off if your elder sister had handed in the remote every time you asked and allowed everything you demanded? Would you, therefore as a parent, want to employ the same freedom-first approach of allowing your son/daughter to decide when they can come back home in the night, or who they can go with on an outstation tour?
Let me know whenever you are able to crack the above equation out; and we can both take my mom on a call together to let her know what we think. What? No? Why?
Dr Sandeep Ananthanarayanan, alumnus of IIM Calcutta and University of Buckingham, is the Group Strategy Director of Best Holdings, teaches Strategic Management at North South University and takes M&A sessions at IBA. He is also the QMSC Board member at Bureau of Indian Standards, Government of India.