By Leslie Pratch
Narcissism, Active Coping, and Integrity
Previously, I have argued that predicting the performance of an executive requires looking below the surface of personality. This argument rings true for integrity. The high and low integrity executives appeared superficially similar. All of the executives described themselves as desiring and attaining high achievement. The low executives differed slightly from the high executives in their conscious self-presentations. They tended to emphasize a more autonomous stance towards authority, a fear of being dependent on others, a need to exhibit their talents, a mistrust of other people, and an extremely positive self-concept, bordering on the grandiose.
When I looked at the underlying foundations of self, their histories, and their relationships, however, the poor coping and integrity of the low integrity executives was obvious. This finding is consistent with the argument that the best predictions occur when one can look at the whole person, past and present, private and public, unconscious and conscious.
The finding that high and low integrity executives appeared similar on the surface suggests conceptual and practical issues in executive selection. The conceptual issue is considered in the following paragraph and the practical one in section after that.
As noted earlier, the low integrity executives had enough past success and current skills to impress those who hired them for their executive roles. To have been successful, they must have evinced both business talent and coping ability, including perseverance, endurance, and ambition. What then does the study indicate about the relationship between coping ability and integrity?
In psychoanalytic theory, integrity is related to superego development. Good active coping comes from identifying with good caring parents. Children internalize the emotional connection and the parenting relationships they experience with their parents. This gives them strength. They learn not only how to pursue goals with discipline but they also learn how to love themselves and others. The high integrity executives were self-actualizing within a system of values. Through their active coping, they were able to find a way to bring into balance their core personalities (their internal drives and standards and ideals internalized from their parents) and the demands of the environment while promoting self-development and adaptation.
The identification of the high integrity executives with loving and idealized parents, particularly their fathers, tempered their needs to promote themselves. Their self-esteem was based on the love and support they felt from their parents, that fostered their ability to maintain a strong sense of self through their own accomplishments. They abided by the rules instilled in them and needed to come by their success in an honest and ethical way. They worked to achieve within a moral framework. Because they genuinely loved and trusted their parents, they accepted their parents’ values. They considered the needs of others when making decisions, tempering their striving for recognition and success with true concern for others. They recognized they could not achieve success without a collective effort. They felt responsible for the efforts of others.
By contrast, the low integrity executives were weak on the self-esteem/integrity dimension of the active coping style. One could surmise that they did not develop an underlying self-love born of genuine admiration of their parents. Their projective stories suggested that most of them seemed to feel angry at their parents, lonely, and unworthy. To compensate for unmet needs, they appeared to develop a defensively autonomous life style and an illusory belief in themselves as being almost perfect. Their personality structures resembled those of patients that clinicians label as “pathological narcissism.” Pathological narcissism as summarized elsewhere[i] appears in four areas:
1. Self-esteem: Narcissists are very sensitive to criticism. When criticized, they tend to denounce the critic angrily. Under usual conditions, such individuals are haughty, consciously self-satisfied, and boastful. Unconsciously, they tend to feel insecure, inferior, lacking self-worth.
2. Interpersonal relationships: Narcissists are extraordinarily self-centered and relate to others in a supercilious and essentially exploitative manner. They expect others to recognize their achievements (whether those achievements are real or fantasized), cater to their needs, support their endeavors, and never oppose them. Where possible, they surround themselves with fawning and subservient followers. They can sponsor, praise, or validate others as long as those others serve their needs. Otherwise they are quick to disparage.
3. Reality orientation: Narcissists differ in the accuracy of their reality testing, depending on other facets of their personality. As a rule, narcissists distort their perceptions of self and environment to protect an exaggeratedly positive or grandiose self-image. These distortions can include outright denial of weaknesses, rationalizations, attributions to external sources of any personal shortcomings of the self, and projections of personal faults onto others.
4. Identity: Narcissists possess an identity characterized by a sense of being special. They usually view themselves as particularly talented in some area of endeavor. They feel entitled to receive constant adulation and service from others. When they feel thwarted, they feel entitled to vent anger on those who would detract them. They also need outer reality to confirm their perception that they are special.
This description of pathological narcissism is drawn from a manual used by clinicians treating individuals in psychotherapy. These patients have suffered severe attacks on their narcissistic needs as they developed, usually in the form of rejection or hurtful criticism or abuse by one or both of their parents. The narcissism that develops is a defensive or developmentally-desperate attempt to maintain self-worth (and prevent total depressive collapse) by holding onto a more primitive form of narcissism, which elevates the self above all others–what Kohut called the “grandiose self.”[ii]
In optimal psychological development, this grandiose self gradually becomes a socialized, reality oriented, healthy self. The transformation occurs by means of identification with caring, empathic, but kindly limiting parents (see Appendix B). The developing child is able to surrender the magical power and temptation of total narcissism for a realistic, socially-oriented, self-respecting, and effective self. The child does not need to resort to pathological means to sustain a sense of self-importance or cohesion. Indeed, pathological narcissism results from an attempt to prevent psychological disintegration by rejecting those parts of reality that would threaten self-esteem in order to fixate on the infantile belief that one is the powerful center of the world.
The deficit in self-esteem was the Achilles heel of the low integrity executives. Individuals with such deficits may function for years in active, adaptive mode, with only small telltale signs of underlying structural deficits. Such signs may include less consistent upward mobility or more disturbed personal lives as compared to high integrity executives. At some point, a constellation develops in which they may feel threatened, angry at authority figures, jealous of colleagues, unconsciously lonely, or aware of an opportunity to validate their grandiosity. At that point, the problematic behavior appears. Once it does, it may recur as a pattern until discovered, or precipitate a crisis if uncovered immediately. Sometimes, when caught, such individuals will try to deny their actions, rationalize them, run away, or collapse in a state of shame which may lead to suicide.
[i] See Jacobowitz & Newton (1999).
[ii] Kohut, H. (1971, 1977).
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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist from the Northwestern Medical School with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance from Chicago Booth and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors of public companies as well as private equity investors to assess and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919 or leslie@pratchco.com or www.pratchco.com.
