Published on: March 31, 2025 at 8:18 pm
Many privileged people may view the world through a self-serving and self-aggrandizing lens, which can get in the way of them reaching their full potential as leaders. That said, professionals from privileged backgrounds might be able to unlock better leadership and communication skills by acknowledging and mitigating those narcissistic tendencies.
That’s according to Academy of Management Scholar Sean Martin of the University of Virginia, who said that research that he did with Stéphane Côté of the University of Toronto and Colonel Todd Woodruff of the West Point Military Academy found that the parental income of teenage applicants to West Point was predictive of how narcissistic they’d become as adults.
“What that led to was them engaging in less of what we consider to be very useful leadership behaviors: building good relationships, clearly structuring the work, and creating good context for communication,” Martin said. “On the other hand, people who come from lower-class backgrounds might actually be able to be good at doing those things that we consider to be very good leadership behaviors, because they might possess less of the self-focus that comes with narcissism.
“I have to be very clear that the way that we measure is not a psychoanalyst diagnosing someone on a couch as a narcissist, but rather it’s indicating greater agreement with statements that indicate you think fairly highly of yourself,” he said. “People from a lower-class background might have a tendency to get out of your own head, whereas narcissists view things through the lens of how everything affects them.
“Instead, having to climb the ladder from a lower social class makes those professionals more likely to view things through the lens of how things affect their team, their community, the people around them, and maybe that leads them to be more likely to engage in desirable leadership behaviors.”
