**1. Introduction**

I have always been fascinated by leadership. I have wondered for decades what compels people to go above and beyond expectations and in a military context inspires people to perform acts of bravery that seem totally illogical to any sane and rational person. What are the leadership qualities that inspire followers to achieve and perform in such outstanding ways? For

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2018 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

nearly 40 years, first in business and then as an academic researcher, I have sought for understanding of this complex dynamic called leadership. Are outstanding leaders born or taught or some mix of both? Conversely, are poor leaders naturally poor. Why, and can they be taught to be good leaders. In other words, can leadership be taught? It would be great to be able to identify and discuss the behaviors of effective leaders that I have observed over the years. Sadly, this chapter would be short indeed since the vast majority of the managers I had contact with exhibited dark side attributes of leadership. Sometimes it seems like some powerful Sith Lord from Star Wars has seduced managers and leaders over to the Dark Side of The Force.

organizational behavior, leadership, ethics and/or similar courses where attributes of effective and ineffective managers and leaders are routinely explored. The follow up question is how is it that, so many intelligent people simply ignore the teachings of experts from highly recognized universities worldwide. And, more importantly, the problem seems to be getting worse, not better. In the last few decades of my business career, before entering academia, it seemed to be more and more difficult to connect to and inspire new entrants to the workforce and to identify people with the skills needed to be successful leaders if advanced into higher

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We, as educators and influencers of future generations of leaders should reflect on the results of **NOT** attempting to answer this question. Is it possible to create organizational structure that helps reduce the risk of creating another Enron where Lay, Skilling, and Fastow were able to seduce and corrupt an entire company in the pursuit of vast riches? How about Bernie Ebbers who seduced the Board of Directors at WorldCom to advance him loans to prevent him from selling vast amounts of stock to fund a lavish lifestyle. The Board feared that such large stock sales would depress the stock price and this along with other fraudulent accounting practices only delayed the downfall of WorldCom. The high-profile rogue's gallery includes people like Angelo Mozilo at Countrywide who was a key player in causing the mortgage industry melt down that pulled the entire USA into recession and John Rigas at Adelphia Communications who siphoned over \$100 million from Adelphia to fund other family owned businesses. Of course, these famous examples that hit the headlines are just the tip of the iceberg. Leaders and managers at all levels are faced with opportunities and forces that are capable of seducing otherwise upstanding individuals to pursue the Dark Side. The forces that influence dark leadership are not confined to the C-suite. They exist throughout the organization and individuals respond in ways to meet their own self-interest too many times.

*"If the hammer is your only tool, then every problem is a nail."—Abraham Maslow*

Perhaps the root of the problem is represented in the volumes have been written about differences between millennials and the post-World War II baby boomers who remain the dominant managerial force and who shaped the corporate structures and philosophies being used in practice and taught in universities today. If one compares the contents of a management textbook from 25 years ago with those currently being used at universities reveals striking similarities. Universities continue to promote concepts and methods developed and used in an industrial twentieth century in a twenty-first century environment that is vastly different. Who can blame current executives? It is what they have been taught by "so-called" experts. Differences in the world view between millennials and their leaders may just be the beginning. Consider how work has changed from sweating in a factory to sitting in front of a computer screen trying to figure out a problem or develop the "next big thing." Technology has changed the way we communicate and interact and share knowledge. The pace of change has accelerated with knowledge and experiences now being shared at light speed around the globe. Consider the concept of stakeholders versus stockholders in management. While introduced into management thinking in the 1930s the concept of stakeholders was not firmly associated with management strategy until the mid-1980s by R. Edward Freeman in *Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach* [8] and did not emerge as a popular

management levels. Again, it begs the question, **WHY**?

issue until the mid-1990s.

In the popular Star Wars movies, an invisible Force flows through all things and can be used for good or evil. Jedi Knights are highly trained and disciplined warriors who use The Force for good to protect others and defend those who cannot defend themselves. The Sith Lord uses the Dark Side or evil side of the force to gain power by any means necessary. The Sith Lord attracts noble Jedi Knights to do his evil bidding by seducing them to the Dark Side by targeting personality weaknesses with promises of power and the ability to use the Dark Side of The Force to achieve some deeply personal objective. Once the noble Jedi Knight commits to the Dark Side, it is very difficult if not impossible to turn back. I have seen similar behavior among young, emerging leaders, who are seduced by the promise of wealth and power and compromise their principles in favor of material gain or power. Wealth and power are powerful forces for which people and entire organizations are willing to ignore what is right in exchange for personal advancement.

Over the decades, I can identify many examples of destructive and negative leadership, destructive organizational behavior, narcissism, greed, and far too many examples of managerial incompetence to mention. In fact, there are numerous studies that provide evidence supporting my observations and suggest that my personal experience is not unique. For instance:


The first overwhelming unanswered question is how can this possibly be when a bachelor's degree or MBA is almost a universal prerequisite for advancement in managerial ranks. We know that most managers at least at some point in their careers sat in classes on management, organizational behavior, leadership, ethics and/or similar courses where attributes of effective and ineffective managers and leaders are routinely explored. The follow up question is how is it that, so many intelligent people simply ignore the teachings of experts from highly recognized universities worldwide. And, more importantly, the problem seems to be getting worse, not better. In the last few decades of my business career, before entering academia, it seemed to be more and more difficult to connect to and inspire new entrants to the workforce and to identify people with the skills needed to be successful leaders if advanced into higher management levels. Again, it begs the question, **WHY**?

nearly 40 years, first in business and then as an academic researcher, I have sought for understanding of this complex dynamic called leadership. Are outstanding leaders born or taught or some mix of both? Conversely, are poor leaders naturally poor. Why, and can they be taught to be good leaders. In other words, can leadership be taught? It would be great to be able to identify and discuss the behaviors of effective leaders that I have observed over the years. Sadly, this chapter would be short indeed since the vast majority of the managers I had contact with exhibited dark side attributes of leadership. Sometimes it seems like some powerful Sith Lord from Star Wars has seduced managers and leaders over to the Dark Side of The Force.

In the popular Star Wars movies, an invisible Force flows through all things and can be used for good or evil. Jedi Knights are highly trained and disciplined warriors who use The Force for good to protect others and defend those who cannot defend themselves. The Sith Lord uses the Dark Side or evil side of the force to gain power by any means necessary. The Sith Lord attracts noble Jedi Knights to do his evil bidding by seducing them to the Dark Side by targeting personality weaknesses with promises of power and the ability to use the Dark Side of The Force to achieve some deeply personal objective. Once the noble Jedi Knight commits to the Dark Side, it is very difficult if not impossible to turn back. I have seen similar behavior among young, emerging leaders, who are seduced by the promise of wealth and power and compromise their principles in favor of material gain or power. Wealth and power are powerful forces for which people and entire organizations are willing to ignore what is right in

Over the decades, I can identify many examples of destructive and negative leadership, destructive organizational behavior, narcissism, greed, and far too many examples of managerial incompetence to mention. In fact, there are numerous studies that provide evidence supporting my observations and suggest that my personal experience is not unique. For instance:

• More than 75% of participants in various employee satisfaction surveys indicate that deal-

• A study published by the *Harvard Business Review* indicated that only 30% of businesses had "healthy and respectful" work environments. The majority of organizations in the

• The vast majority of organizational change initiatives fail to yield expected results primarily due to managerial incompetence [5]. Some researchers place this failure rate as high as

• In 2012, three Italian researchers demonstrated mathematically that if the base rate of management incompetence is between 50 and 75%, then random promotions would yield more efficient organizations. The researchers were awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for demonstrating that organizations would be better off by choosing people for promotions by pulling names

The first overwhelming unanswered question is how can this possibly be when a bachelor's degree or MBA is almost a universal prerequisite for advancement in managerial ranks. We know that most managers at least at some point in their careers sat in classes on management,

ing with their immediate boss is the most stressful part of their job [1, 2].

study had dysfunctional or unhealthy work environments [3, 4].

from a hat than from a lengthy and convoluted evaluation process [7].

exchange for personal advancement.

110 Dark Sides of Organizational Behavior and Leadership

90% [6].

We, as educators and influencers of future generations of leaders should reflect on the results of **NOT** attempting to answer this question. Is it possible to create organizational structure that helps reduce the risk of creating another Enron where Lay, Skilling, and Fastow were able to seduce and corrupt an entire company in the pursuit of vast riches? How about Bernie Ebbers who seduced the Board of Directors at WorldCom to advance him loans to prevent him from selling vast amounts of stock to fund a lavish lifestyle. The Board feared that such large stock sales would depress the stock price and this along with other fraudulent accounting practices only delayed the downfall of WorldCom. The high-profile rogue's gallery includes people like Angelo Mozilo at Countrywide who was a key player in causing the mortgage industry melt down that pulled the entire USA into recession and John Rigas at Adelphia Communications who siphoned over \$100 million from Adelphia to fund other family owned businesses. Of course, these famous examples that hit the headlines are just the tip of the iceberg. Leaders and managers at all levels are faced with opportunities and forces that are capable of seducing otherwise upstanding individuals to pursue the Dark Side. The forces that influence dark leadership are not confined to the C-suite. They exist throughout the organization and individuals respond in ways to meet their own self-interest too many times.

#### *"If the hammer is your only tool, then every problem is a nail."—Abraham Maslow*

Perhaps the root of the problem is represented in the volumes have been written about differences between millennials and the post-World War II baby boomers who remain the dominant managerial force and who shaped the corporate structures and philosophies being used in practice and taught in universities today. If one compares the contents of a management textbook from 25 years ago with those currently being used at universities reveals striking similarities. Universities continue to promote concepts and methods developed and used in an industrial twentieth century in a twenty-first century environment that is vastly different. Who can blame current executives? It is what they have been taught by "so-called" experts. Differences in the world view between millennials and their leaders may just be the beginning. Consider how work has changed from sweating in a factory to sitting in front of a computer screen trying to figure out a problem or develop the "next big thing." Technology has changed the way we communicate and interact and share knowledge. The pace of change has accelerated with knowledge and experiences now being shared at light speed around the globe. Consider the concept of stakeholders versus stockholders in management. While introduced into management thinking in the 1930s the concept of stakeholders was not firmly associated with management strategy until the mid-1980s by R. Edward Freeman in *Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach* [8] and did not emerge as a popular issue until the mid-1990s.

Over the past 15 years my colleagues and I have worked with hundreds of senior executives in many industries across the globe and asked what has changed. When we ask if the way we work with people has changed, has the nature of the work being done by our people changed, have the interests and goals of stakeholders changed, and is the environment that the organization operates in different, the overwhelming response is either "Big changes" or "Very big changes." Yet when we then ask if we have changed how we organize and manage the people and the organization the response is overwhelming "Very small change" or "Small change." **Figure 1** illustrates the feedback that we have gotten. Knowing that managers and executives continue to structure organizations and handle people using outdated concepts and methods, the existence of so much destructive, negative, inflexible, and incompetent leadership should not be surprising. Nearly every profession and discipline on the planet has experienced massive change in recent decades, all except management and leadership which are firmly rooted in methods and ideas of the industrial twentieth century.

evil Sith Lord and Dark Side of The Force by adopting people-centric management practices

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In the twenty-first VUCA century, organizations of all types, sizes, maturity, industry, etc., must identify new processes and structures and be aware of the importance that people have on the success or failure of the organization. Okay, most of us would agree that everyone knows that people are your most important asset. In reality, this is a nice buzzword that is largely overlooked or ignored in practice by many leaders in many organizations. It sounds great and looks good on the company web site and is almost a required statement. Can you imagine a company saying anything like "Our mission is to make as much money as possible at the expense of our employees, suppliers, or the environment."? Clearly, a statement like this would be a death blow to any company, but I suggest that many people reading this chapter have experienced organizations where this was the "real" mission statement. I, and my colleague, Lukas Michel, view leadership as an integral part of a complex, dynamic, managerial and organizational system where each part influences the others which is driven by interactions among people. Lukas Michel in *The Performance Triangle: Diagnostic Mentoring to Manage Organizations and People for Superior Performance in Turbulent Times* described what he calls the Performance Triangle shown in **Figure 2** [9]. The dynamic system consists of organizational culture, systems, and leadership and is powered by people through their shared purpose, relationships, and collaboration. What this means is that effective leaders are simultaneously a function of and contributors to the culture and systems but the power for the

**2. Dynamic capabilities of people-centric organizations**

entire system comes from people both internal and external to the organization.

critical factors that either inhibit or enable superior performance.

Success comes by finding the right balance among the various dimensions of the Performance Triangle model. Success can be achieved by constantly evaluating many elements that make up the dimensions to make subtle changes throughout the organization quickly and effectively. Too often, leadership effectiveness seems to be evaluated in isolation and we forget that in addition to dealing with their own personal ambitions and demons, leaders and leadership behaviors are strongly influenced by other factors, many of which they may not even be aware of. I have observed and participated in many leadership development programs where leadership qualities and attributes are discussed. However, the discussion is almost always directed in a way that suggests that leadership is somehow insulated from the rest of the organization or that the leaders dictate how to behave or react to the rest of the organization. Every reader knows leaders who were successful in one situation but were abject failures in a different setting. I suggest that this is because of the complex interactions and power of the culture, systems, and most importantly, **people**. Lukas and I know from our research that there is a very high correlation among the dynamic capabilities of the Performance Triangle model and success [10]. Dimensions and underlying elements of the Performance Triangle that remain unseen to the untrained eye either inhibit or enable success of both the leader and the organization as a whole. Further, in a turbulent VUCA world these unseen forces become

to meet twenty-first century needs.

It seems unlikely that ethics or managerial psychology courses, at any level, have been able to mitigate the pressures for performance and success that bring out the greed and narcissism inherent in the fundamental personalities of many people. The need for personal gratification seems to be a basic human condition and is accentuated in many individuals who, given the opportunity, will take satisfying their ambitions to extremes or may simply lack sufficient emotional intelligence to realize the damage their actions are causing to others and the organization. Maybe minor insecurities become magnified as the pressure and stress that comes with greater titles become major debilitations. The good news is that after nearly two decades of observations and study, we have concluded that all is not necessarily lost! Organizations cannot eliminate many of the forces that result in destructive and incompetent leadership. However, senior leaders and business owners **can** create a managerial system with an environment to help mitigate dark leadership behaviors while simultaneously improving the ability of the organization to adapt and change in a world that is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA). A few courageous Jedi Knights can combat the

**Figure 1.** What has changed?

evil Sith Lord and Dark Side of The Force by adopting people-centric management practices to meet twenty-first century needs.
