Can dark leadership affects the creativity of surrounding people

Leadership has numerous layers to unfold and is a multifaceted construct, constantly changing to meet an evolving workforce. Good leaders make people happy while ensuring performance goals are met, whereas bad leaders usually lower the well-being of everyone in their radius. There could be several keywords associated with a bad leader: workplace aggression, CEO hubris, or leader bullying. But what constitutes dark leadership?

Superheroes like Spider-Man and Iron Man portray charismatic and bright leadership, whereas characters like Batman and James Bond portray dark personality traits, making them anti-heroes. They are driven by impulsivity, dishonesty, and selfishness demonstrating traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. In real life, narcissistic personalities have been associated with religious, political, economic, or military personnel who tend to be dominant, extroverted, and arrogant. Surprisingly, they make great leaders. Although they may be driven by the hunger for power, it fuels their charismatic, selfish, and aggressive style to lead.

On the other hand, Machiavellians are seen to be more effective leaders in an organizational setting due to their calculative nature. They are great communicators and actively participate in demanding situations through planning, coordinating, and controlling their group members. Their leadership strategy is directed by power, management, and manipulation.

Psychopathy is known as the ‘darkest’ dark triad trait. The ultimate goal of a psychopath in an organizational setting is to achieve the highest position. They portray good presentation and communication skills; however, they lack leadership qualities. Psychopaths use strategies like being cold and using hard tactics like threatening their employees and inducing fear. Narcissists use tactics like complimenting the employees to boost confidence. Lastly, Machiavellians use a combination of both, hot and cold tactics to increase the employees’ productivity and efficiency. Hence, in the long run, narcissists and Machiavellians contribute to the growth of an organization, and psychopaths are seen to contribute negatively.

From the perspective of employees, dark leadership is characterized by abusive supervision, manipulation, and toxic work behavior. It affects the creativity, motivation, and attitude of the employees. For instance, suppose you have numerous innovative ideas for improving the organization’s profile but your boss constantly dismisses your efforts and creates a fear-driven environment. This would lead to hesitation and demotivate you from working at your full potential resulting in low productivity and toxic workplace environments. Such environments can lead to frustration and anger contributing to counterproductive work behaviors. However, this relationship can also differ based on the cultural context. 

Dark leadership traits also transpire from a leader’s own creativity. Leaders with creative mindsets often think outside the box and handle tricky workplace situations in unique ways. However, their creativity can sometimes lead them to justify or excuse harmful behavior. For example, leaders who struggle to control their impulses may let their creativity turn into manipulative or abusive actions. They have a harder time seeing the moral consequences of their behavior, which can lead to mistreating their team. Moreover, external or internal triggers like stress or perceived slights can lead to fluctuations like being supportive and warm one day and aggressive and cold the next.

Additionally, leaders with dark personality traits come off as creative visionaries but have been seen to infiltrate organizations by misusing creativity for personal gain rather than the collective good. Such leaders might exploit resources for their personal gain, foster a toxic workplace culture, and engage the organization in high-risk decisions that would result in jeopardizing the long-term stability of the organization.

In sum, dark leadership can have different effects on employee and team creativity and innovation. Dark leadership can also be darkly creative when leaders with dark personalities use their originality to make self-serving, selfish, or even evil decisions. Such as recommending a 90-hour work week.