Narcissism and Leadership in Children

First published February 3, 2021 Search in PubMed for research articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620965536

Commentary

Some leaders are said to exhibit high levels of narcissism, but it is unclear whether a relationship between levels of narcissism and leadership exists in childhood.

This study investigates the relationship between levels of narcissism and different aspects of leadership in children. (N= 332, ages 7-14)

The Pediatric Narcissism Scale was used to assess narcissism levels and peer nomination was used to assess the emergence of leadership in the classroom.

Next, the children were asked to perform a group task.

In this task, one child was randomly assigned as the leader and assessed for perceived actual leadership functioning. These results showed that children with higher levels of narcissism appeared more often as leaders in the classroom.

Also, when given a leadership role in a task, children with higher narcissism levels perceived themselves as better leaders, but their actual leadership function did not differ significantly from that of other leaders. A specification curve analysis corroborated these findings.

These analyses show that children with relatively high levels of narcissism tend to emerge as leaders, even if they are not good leaders.