Examining the relationship between leadership styles and Narcissism

The studies carried out on leadership have continued increasingly from the past to our present day. It has become inevitable for leadership to be examined thoroughly and for the other issues that might be associated with leadership to be the subject to the studies as well as the importance of Leadership has come into prominence much more in both the public sector and the private sector. Narcissism, however, has been started to be sub-clinically dealt with in the organizational behaviour studies within the recent periods and has found a place for itself in the studies on its relations with different organizational behaviour issues as a personality characteristic. From this point of view, this study was carried out in order to examine the relation between the leadership styles and narcissism. For the purpose of determining the relation between the leadership styles and narcissism, the survey method from the quantitative measurement methods was used. 427 people from the public and private sectors participated in the study and the survey data of 381 people from the participants was considered appropriate for the analysis. For the purpose of measuring the leadership styles from the perspective of the employees in the study, the Multifactor Leadership Scale which was developed by Bass (1985) and which was adapted to Turkish by Akdogan (2002) was used. In order to measure the narcissism perceptions of the employees for their managers, however, the Turkish version of the part, which was prepared in order to measure narcissism, of the abbreviated Dark Triplet scale that consists of 12 items as developed by Jonason and Webster (2010) (Özsoy et al., 2017) was used. As a result of the analyses performed, statistically significant relations between leadership styles and its sub-dimensions and narcissism have been found. Furthermore, the discrimination tests were performed for the leadership styles and narcissism perceptions of the participants and, as a result of the analyses, significant differences have been encountered in the averages of the answers that the participants gave according to their demographic and occupational characteristics.