Series 2, Episode 34: The destructive impact of narcissistic leaders on their organisations, with Professor Thanos Verousis, Vlerick Business School, and Professor Pietro Perotti, University of Bath

While we have previously explored the question of narcissism and the dark triad of personality traits on the Brain for Business podcast, the question of how narcissistic leaders impact on overall organisational performance is something we are yet to consider in great detail. Yet this is exactly what our guests today, Professor Thanos Verousis of Vlerick Business School and Professor Pietro Perotti of the University of Bath, examine in a recent paper co-authored with Shee-Yee Khoo of Bangor Business School and Richard Watermeyer of the University of Bristol. To do this they  examine the narcissism of university vice chancellors in the context of the overall performance of their universities. While this might perhaps seem a little obscure to those outside academia, Vice Chancellors are ultimately the CEOs of large and complex organisations and the transferrable insights are many.

Key findings include:

• The appointment of a highly narcissistic VC leads to an overall deterioration in research and teaching performance and concomitantly league table performance
• Key potential mechanisms explaining this include excessive financial risk taking and empire-building
• The findings are consistent with the view that narcissism is one of the most prominent traits of destructive leadership
• There are practical implications for leadership recruitment and the monitoring of leadership practices in the higher education sector

The article discussed - Vice-chancellor narcissism and university performance – can be accessed here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048733323001853

About our guests…

Thanos Verousis is a Professor in Sustainable Finance at Vlerick Business School, Associate Editor at the Journal of Futures Markets and the European Journal of Finance. 

In his research he is particularly interested in understanding behavioural biases and decision-making in finance, especially with respect to departures from the classical rational expectations theory. Thanos also works on Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications in finance, especially in applications involving machine learning and robo-advising.  You can find out more about Thanos’s research here: https://sites.google.com/site/thanosverousis/

Pietro Perotti is a Senior Lecturer, or Associate Professor, at the University of Bath. Pietro researches the capital market consequences of accounting information, financial reporting quality and market microstructure. Pietro’s research has been published in a range of leading journals including Journal of Business Finance and Accounting. Research Policy, Journal of Accounting Literature, Journal of Empirical Finance and Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting.

You can find out more about Pietro’s research here: https://researchportal.bath.ac.uk/en/persons/pietro-perotti

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