CEO Insight
Intimidation works?
Managing through intimidation is an option reserved only for self-aware CEOs.
A statistical analysis of Korn Ferry’s leadership simulation assessments shows that CEOs—if they have a big dose of self-awareness— can be intimidating and even abrasive to create positive effect as a leader. Other senior executives can’t. This flies in the face of the dominant thinking in organizational psychology, which holds that intimidation is problematic for leaders.
What sets CEOs apart from other senior executives? Their focus? Confidence? Tolerance for stress? Add to any list this surprising item: CEOs can use intimidation and socially abrasive behavior in ways that elevate their overall performance as leaders. As companies and other organizations have become less and less hierarchical (DiMaggio 2001; Rajan and Wulf 2006), organizational psychologists and assessment developers generally have characterized the use of intimidation and excessive invocation of formal authority as serious problems for leaders (Benson and Campbell 2007). Of course CEOs have authority over their employees, but wielding it explicitly and boldly is usually associated with ineffective leadership. And yet some CEOs not only get away with authoritarian and intimidating behavior but find that it actually improves their performance. The key to which CEOs can use intimidation effectively is tied directly to the individuals’ level of self-awareness—or how much insight they have into their own behavior, motives, strengths, and weaknesses.1 Statistical analyses of performance data from comprehensive leadership simulations for 47 CEOs reveal just how big a role self-awareness plays. In fact, among highly self-aware CEOs, better leadership performance is associated with greater use of strategic intimidation.2 Not all CEOs get an intimidation performance bump. Authoritarian behavior paired with low self-awareness results in notable ineffectiveness—and gets worse as such CEOs become more intimidating (see Figure 1). In this paper both Intimidation and Self-Awareness were measured using scales of the same names from SHL’s Global Personality Inventory (GPI), owned by CEB.
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2 Korn Ferry models suggest that self-awareness levels anywhere above the arithmetic average of executives begin to transform the negative effects of intimidation into positive ones for CEOs.
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