It’s All About We: Leader Collective Narcissism and Intra- and Inter-Team Behavior

In this paper, we examine how leaders’ collective narcissism can have divergent effects on leaders’ actions toward their own teams and other teams within their organization, as well as the downstream implications of both the intra-team and inter-team dynamics. Specifically, we hypothesize that leaders’ collective narcissism will be associated with their increased intra-team helping behavior but will also be associated with their increased inter-team ostracism. Then, we propose that leaders’ intra-team helping behavior will have beneficial implications for intra-team collaboration and relationship conflict, whereas leaders’ inter-team ostracism will have deleterious implications for inter-team collaboration and relationship conflict. Finally, we argue that these effects will be more pronounced for lower power leaders. Data from a multisource, three-wave survey of 168 leaders and 748 subordinates were collected to test the proposed model. Overall, the results suggest that collective narcissism plays a meaningful role in how leaders act toward and influence their own teams and other teams within their organizations.