At Hogan, we work with organizations every day to help them identify effective leaders using a data-driven approach leveraging the predictive power of our personality assessments. To ensure our services are the best in the business, we have spent decades studying successful and failed leaders.

Our data show that three psychological factors have a profound influence on leadership effectiveness: charisma, narcissism, and humility. Charismatic and narcissistic CEOs have plagued organizations for decades. However, their strong political skills and ability to stand out from the rest of the pack have helped them emerge as leaders within their organizations. On the other hand, humble leaders often go unnoticed, largely because they focus primarily on their teams and not drawing attention to themselves, but research shows they are more likely to be effective leaders.

Join Ryne Sherman, chief science officer of Hogan Assessments, for a webinar hosted by Talent Quarterly 10 am EST on Monday, February 14 as he discusses these three leadership qualities and why “The Charismatic CEO is Dead.” Register here!

Popular wisdom will have you believe that a leader is someone who exudes confidence and charisma because they appear smart, interesting, and engaging. However, more often than not, these types of leaders wreak havoc on the workplace. A growing body of research suggests that humility is a far more important quality in a leader than charisma.

Organizations tend to favor people who “seem” leader-like. Individuals who are self-promoting, interesting, and politically savvy tend to get earmarked for promotion. These leaders know what it takes to get ahead and get noticed, and they strategically cater to audiences who can offer them power, influence, status, or access to resources.

Charisma is the elusive quality of being charming, captivating, and pleasant to be around. We are naturally drawn to charismatic people because we feel good in their presence. However, charismatic people also tend to have inflated views of themselves and their skills. They also tend to be more self-promoting than others. Too much charisma can make for ineffective leaders as their tendency to be narcissistic can alienate those working under them.

In essence, charisma is a double-edged sword. Too little and it’s difficult to persuade team members to support your vision. Too much and team members feel unsupported and disengaged. The strong overlap between charisma and narcissism means that it’s easy for charm to turn into arrogance and entitlement.

Humility, on the other hand, is vitally important to creating stability and engagement within teams. One of the most famous studies on the topic analyzes the success of 11 high-performing companies. The leaders in the highest performing firms had two things in common: they were fiercely competitive, yet personally humble.

Humility is a relatively new subject in the context of leadership and organizational effectiveness, primarily because humble leaders typically don’t stand out from the crowd. Preliminary research on the topic shows that a humble leader inspires collaboration and earns the respect of their team members. They also create working environments with higher degrees of satisfaction and productivity. Although the subject is relatively new, there are valid claims for making it measurable. Initial research shows that these skills indicate humility: modesty, sincerity, openness to feedback, recognizing others, low levels of arrogance, and low levels of narcissism.

Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, emphasized the importance of humility as an essential attribute of leadership recently. “Good leaders combine personal humility, self-knowledge, and the ability to learn,” says Carney. “That means admitting mistakes, seeking and accepting feedback,and sharing the lessons you have learned.”

There is good news for those who are not naturally humble: research suggests that just by showing signs of humility, overly charismatic leaders can offset the qualities that make them unlikeable. A dose of humility can make a narcissistic boss seem more approachable, supportive, and open to feedback.

“Humility has the ability to counteract the potentially harmful effects of narcissism, which can lead to positive outcomes for the organization,” says Dena Rhodes, Research Consultant for Hogan Assessments. “This suggests that individuals can still have a narcissistic identity and be effective as a leader, as long as they have a humble reputation.”

The good news is that even the most arrogant of leaders can increase their effectiveness by showing humility, even if it’s not entirely genuine. Here are a few tips for avoiding the pitfalls of charisma:

1. Put the spotlight on others: make a concerted effort to recognize the achievements of team members and subordinates
2. Increase self-awareness: actively try to understand your limitations and show a willingness to acknowledge your mistakes
3. Be open to feedback: a trademark of humility is being coachable, which means opening yourself up to criticism and accepting that your way is not the only way
4. Check your sense of entitlement: work to earn the respect of your colleagues, don’t automatically assume you are entitled to it
5. Monitor your self-promoting behaviors: focus on trying to get along rather than getting ahead

The existing paradigm in the business world holds that successful CEOs are ambitious, result-oriented, individualistic, and, above all, charismatic. The rise of agency theory, or the notion that incentivizing managers should improve shareholder returns, put greater emphasis on the need to hire leaders that appear leader-like. Unfortunately, conventional wisdom of what a leader looks like is, quite simply, incorrect.

Charisma is a very attractive characteristic in a leader. Yet, when promoted, these individuals create chaos and ruin for their organizations. Humility, rather, is a much better indicator of leadership success. Jim Collins, renowned author of Good to Great, conducted extensive research on organizational success. His work clearly demonstrated that companies led by modest managers consistently outperformed their competitors, and tended to be the dominant players in their sectors. Moreover, humble leaders tend to stay at their organizations longer than their arrogant counterparts, and their companies continue to perform well even after they leave because humble leaders often ensure a succession plan before they depart.

The Problem with Charisma

Organizations tend to be good at identifying people who “look” like leaders. Individuals who seem confident, bright, charismatic, interesting, and politically savvy tend to get earmarked for promotion. Personality assessments show that charismatic leaders rank highly on measurements of self-confidence (Bold), dramatic flair (Colorful), readiness to test the limits (Mischievous), and expansive visionary thinking (Imaginative). These leaders know what it takes to get ahead and get noticed, and they strategically cater to individuals and audiences who can offer them power, influence, status, or access to resources. While these individuals are highly interpersonally savvy and excellent self-promoters, they lack basic leadership and management skills.

Although some charisma can be beneficial, it often leads to lower levels of leadership effectiveness. One possible explanation is that highly charismatic leaders may be more strategically ambitious but less effective at the day-to-day operations. Emergent (read: charismatic) leaders, or individuals who stand out from the crowd, get promoted because they spend their time politicking and networking – trying to please their bosses by managing up rather than being concerned with those working under them.

Emergent leaders also create a culture of competition, ambition, and narcissism. Leaders like people like themselves, so senior leaders are more likely to choose successors who best reflect the status quo. Of course, competition and ambition can be positive qualities in the business world, but not if it comes at the expense of actual hard work.

Humility Breeds Effectiveness

Whereas charismatic leaders tend to focus on personal advancement, humble leaders tend to focus on team performance and guiding their employees. Effective leaders are more modest; they are willing to admit mistakes, share credit, and learn from others. Higher levels of humility also lead to higher rates of employee engagement, more job satisfaction, and lower rates of turnover. To be clear, humility does not imply the absence of ego or ambition. Rather, humble leaders are better able to channel their ambition back into the organization, rather than use it for personal gain.

Humility is broadly defined as 1) self-awareness, 2) appreciating others’ strengths and contribution, and 3) openness to new ideas and feedback regarding one’s performance. Leaders who are humble have a better grasp on organizational needs and make better informed decisions about task performance. They are also better able to ask for help than their charismatic counterparts. What’s more is that humble leaders help to foster a culture of development with their employees by legitimizing learning and personal development. Humility also encourages cultures of openness, trust, and recognition, which are important precursors to success.

Dig Deeper to Identify Humble Leaders

The challenge in hiring and developing strong leaders is in their identification. Charismatic, or highly emergent, leaders easily stand out from the crowd and their likability masks more important characteristics of performance. Humble, and typically more effective, leaders may fly under the radar and be passed over for hiring or promoting. Building selection and development programs that overcome personal biases and focus on objective indicators of success can help identify these low flyers. Organizations can benefit from the use of psychometric testing and 360 evaluation to counteract political factors by developing a data-driven approach that ensures organizations recognize and promote those who will be effective and humble leaders.

This article was originally published in Talent Economy.

*This post was authored by Robert Hogan & Ryne Sherman.

There is a fascinating connection between two seemingly unrelated topics: self-deception and leadership. The two themes often come together in the lives of prominent politicians, for example, in the career of Barack Obama. Let us explain.

We are both fascinated by the idea that people often do things for reasons of which they are unaware. On the one hand, it is pretty obvious that people frequently act without knowing (or caring) why they behave as they do. On the other hand, why is that? For Freud, unconscious thoughts are created by what he called “repression:” one part of the mind (the Ego) recognizes that another part of the mind (the Id) prompts us to do things that will be great fun but which will get us in trouble. The Ego saves us from ourselves by repressing the impulses of the Id—most of the time. But from time to time, the Id escapes the Ego, and we do naughty things. Even then, however, the Ego protects us by “repressing” our awareness of what we have done and why. Freud goes on to say that maturity involves replacing repression with condemnation: immature people repress their socially inappropriate impulses; mature people acknowledge that they have socially inappropriate impulses but refuse to act on them.

The existentialists (Sartre, Camus) interpreted the Freudian unconscious in an interesting way. They understood that people often do selfish things without being aware of what they are doing. But they attributed this lack of awareness to “self-deception” (in French, mauvaise foi—bad faith), a tendency to avoid recognizing the reasons for one’s actions. Self-deception is nothing more than lying to oneself about the reasons for one’s actions. For the existentialists, then, self-deception is a form of cowardice—an inability to face up to the meaning of one’s decisions—and they argued that people have a moral obligation to overcome self-deception. So, we are left with two questions: (1) Are people often unaware of the reasons for their actions; and (2) are they still responsible for those actions?  Freud says “yes” and “no,” the existentialists say “yes” and “yes,” and we agree with Sartre and Camus.

Freud mistrusted politicians, whom he saw as ruthless psychopaths driven by the desire to dominate others—Freud had Hitler and Napoleon in mind. In our view, psychopaths are charismatic, charming, and ruthless, but they also tend to be impulsive, opportunistic, and lacking career agendas. Like psychopaths, narcissists also can be charismatic, manipulative, and ruthless, but unlike psychopaths, they tend to be strategic about their careers. In addition, most psychopaths are loners, whereas narcissists often build coalitions of supporters. We believe many politicians are narcissists—people who want power and control, feel they deserve it, and work to gain it.

Charisma and narcissism are closely related—to the point that charisma is a code word for narcissism.  And this has important implications for leadership. Charismatic people tend to be chosen for leadership positions, but charismatic narcissists make ruinous leaders. A substantial literature (cf. O’Reilly, 2017) shows that narcissistic CEOs are overly confident, unwilling to listen to feedback, and hostile and combative when challenged. These tendencies are associated with excessive risk-taking and a range of unethical behavior including tax avoidance, manipulating accounting data, and excessive personal compensation. The risk-taking leads to bad investments and ill-advised law suits, staff alienation and defections, and poor overall financial performance. Humility is the opposite of narcissism, and a growing empirical literature shows that humility in combination with appropriate self-confidence predicts leadership effectiveness and organizational success (Ou, 2012; Owens et al., 2013).

Turning back to political leaders, politicians want power and control, but they are surrounded by like-minded competitors. To gain power, they often claim that they only want to serve the public and work for the greater good, with no thought of personal gain. They claim to seek power in order to help those who lack power. And they can project this message so well that it becomes hard to see what is behind it.

The essence of animal communication is deception—most animal communication is intended to deceive competitors and predators. It follows that much human communication serves the same purpose. The difference between politicians and the rest of us is not that they are deceptive; the difference is that they are good at it and they know why they are doing it. In addition, the best liars are those who believe their own stories, and this brings us back to self-deception, to Barack Obama, and to Ben Rhodes’ new book on Obama’s leadership. Rhodes was recently interviewed about his book on National Public Radio. In that interview, Rhodes came across as bright and articulate, but also as narcissistic and self-deceived. This impression was confirmed in the following (astonishing) commentary on his book in Sunday’s (June 10^th) Wall Street Journal:

“Mr. Rhodes’ prose is engaging, and his Syria narrative, contrary to his slippery reputation, is astonishingly candid. We can attribute his honesty to a lack of self-awareness. He depicts himself, Mr. Obama and other members of the former president’s team as not only tragically indecisive and irresponsible but self-absorbed to the point of moral insensateness.  Yet there is no indication Mr. Rhodes understands that his account is damning.”

So, what is the point? First, Freud was right: politicians are not like the rest of us; they have a distinctive psychology that sets them apart from ordinary citizens. Second, Freud was wrong about that psychology. Even dictators like Saddam Hussein and Bashar al Assad are not psychopaths; rather, they are narcissistic politicians who escaped the bonds of accountability. Unlike psychopaths, successful dictators are clear minded about their goals—they are pragmatic, rational, and make data-based decisions in order to secure their legacies. Third, our own elected politicians also tend to be narcissists (Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Woodrow Wilson, etc.); charismatic, charming, and self-deceived. Sincerity is the mark of people who have been taken in by their own acts. The problems occur when political leaders commit their countries to seemingly humanitarian projects that are actually intended to secure their own personal legacies: Woodrow Wilson in WWI; Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam; George Bush in Iraq…

References

O’Reilly, C.A.  (2017).  The Leadership Quarterly.  http//dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2017.08.001

Rhodes, B.  (2018).  The world as it is:  A memoir of the Obama white house.  New York:  Penguin.

Ou, Y. (2012). CEO humility and its relationship with middle manager behaviors and performance: Examining the CEO-middle manager interface. Dissertation Abstracts International Section A: Humanities and Social Sciences, 72(7-A), 2478.

Owens, B. P., Johnson, M. D., & Mitchell, T. R. (2013). Expressed humility in organizations: Implications for performance, teams, and leadership. Organizational Science, 24, 1517-1538. doi: 10.1287/orsc.1120.0795

*This article was originally published by Training Industry on May 1, 2018.

One of the best studies ever conducted on organizational effectiveness was done by Jim Collins and described in his book “Good to Great.” Collins identified 11 firms from the Fortune 1000 that had 15 years of below-average performance in their industry followed by 15 years of above-average performance. The key question of the investigation is, what took these 11 firms from “good” to “great”?

Collins ultimately concluded (somewhat reluctantly) that the key driver of change in organizational performance was a change in leadership. However, simply changing the leadership was not enough. Collins found that these 11 high-performing firms chose leaders with an almost paradoxical blend of characteristics: They were fiercely competitive, yet personally humble.

It is easy to understand why leaders who are fiercely competitive are more effective: They want to beat the competition. What is less clear is why humility – as opposed to confidence, charm and charisma – was characteristic of the most effective leaders. This article draws on recent research in personality science to offer three generalizations about humility, leadership and organizational effectiveness.

Generalization #1: Humble Leaders Are More Effective.

In a systematic series of studies, Bradley Owens demonstrated that employees working for humble leaders are more engaged, satisfied and productive and better organizational citizens. That is, they talk up the organization to others, building a positive reputation for their organization. Additionally, organizations with humble leaders suffer from less turnover and are themselves more collectively humble.

So, what is it that humble leaders do to create such positive results? At least three things: First, humble leaders give credit to their team members and let everyone share in the team’s success. Doing so builds trust among the team. If subordinates do not trust their leader, the mission is doomed to failure. Humble leaders build trust.

Second, humble leaders recognize their own shortcomings and are willing to ask for help when a problem is outside of their area of expertise. Because team members trust humble leaders, they are happy to help when their leader asks.

Third, humble leaders are coachable. They listen to feedback from others and use it to improve their own performance. Leaders who lack humility cannot get better, because they ignore feedback.

Generalization #2: Humble Leaders Are Overlooked.

Unfortunately, modern organizations often overlook their most effective (humble) leaders. Charisma, charm and self-proclamations of competence are strong predictors of leadership emergence (i.e., being chosen to lead), despite their lack of association with leadership effectiveness (i.e., building a winning team). Because humble leaders give credit to others and avoid the spotlight, senior leadership often overlooks and underestimates their accomplishments.

Our own data show that ambition (i.e., the tendency to take charge, compete and advance one’s career) is slightly negatively correlated with humility. In other words, one of the key factors associated with leadership emergence (ambition) is negatively correlated with a key factor of leadership effectiveness (humility). The grid below illustrates the situation:

As shown, if leaders are selected for their emergence characteristics (i.e., high emergence), the probability of choosing an ineffective leader is 60 percent! This is precisely why Collins referred to the 11 most effective leaders as holding a paradoxical combination of traits. A small fraction of leaders possess both ambition and humility.

Generalization #3: Lack of Humility Ruins Organizations.

Most businesses ultimately fail, and the primary cause of organizational failure is poor leadership. There are many ways that leadership can go wrong, but four themes – all related to a lack of humility – are readily apparent. The first theme of poor management is an exaggerated sense of self and entitlement. Such narcissists obviously lack humility but are quite adept at getting themselves into leadership positions (see generalization #2). Ultimately, these leaders alienate their staff because they make promises that they cannot keep, they take credit for all successes, and they blame anyone and everyone else for any failures. Talented employees quit or find themselves on the proverbial chopping block. When talent leaves, organizations fail.

The second theme of poor management is a lack of awareness about how one’s actions are affecting others. These leaders are insensitive to the “people side” of doing business. Further, they fail to recognize this insensitivity as a shortcoming. Subordinates see them as cold and uncaring. While humble leaders are open to listening to what other people feel and think, insensitive leaders are unwilling to listen to opinions and feedback from others.

The third theme of poor management is an exaggerated need for social support and approval. All people have some need for social support and approval, but some really poor leaders are desperate for it (think Michael Scott from “The Office”). Similarly, the fourth theme of poor management is insecurity and low self-confidence. Both of these traits are rooted in insecurity and fear of rejection. Leaders who lack humility are desperate for attention and approval of others. Indeed, much of their expressed arrogance and overconfidence is intended to mask a deep desire for the approval of others. On the flip side, however, people who are overly humble may also suffer from such insecurities. For example, agreeing with the statement “I’m not very good at things” may reflect either true humility or a lack of self-confidence. Leaders who are appropriately humble are seen as confident and suffer from neither diffidence nor arrogance.

Leaders are the most consequential members of any organization. Unfortunately, the current cultural attraction to leaders who are charming, charismatic and self-promoting (e.g., transformational leadership) is leading us in the wrong direction. Some of our most effective leaders are hiding in our organizations, masked by their own humility. For the future success of our organizations, finding them is critical.

“This porridge is too hot!”

“This porridge is too cold.”

“Ahhh, this porridge is just right.”

–Goldilocks

At Hogan, we’ve been talking a lot about Humility lately. We’ve spent much less time talking about its antonym – Charisma. However, colleagues have used the Hogan Development Survey (HDS) to study charisma and recently published their findings in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. This post highlights their key findings, relates it to our own thinking about humility, and calls out some practical implications for coaching and leadership development.

In their paper, Jasmine Vergauwe, Bart Wille, Joeri Hofmans, Rob Kaiser, and Filip De Fruyt show that the HDS contains a “Charisma Cluster” of scales. Specifically, the Bold, Mischievous, Colorful, and Imaginative scales together form a measure of charisma that reflects a combination of confidence, risk-taking, social presence, and strong vision.

People with high scores on the Charisma Cluster describe themselves as talkative, inventive, energetic, and original. They also describe themselves as good-looking, persevering, and ingenious. In contrast, observers describe these individuals only as talkative, energetic, and original, not as good looking and persevering.  Thus, individuals with a charismatic personality have inflated views of themselves that are inconsistent with how others see them.

Second, and most importantly, the researchers examined the relationship between charisma and overall effectiveness in a sample of over 300 business leaders. Once again, self-ratings of overall effectiveness were inconsistent with coworker ratings: HDS charisma scores significantly predicted self-rated effectiveness (r = .29), whereas the charisma scores were uncorrelated with coworker-rated effectiveness. But the story didn’t end there.

There was a significant curvilinear relationship between HDS charisma scores and coworker-rated effectiveness. According to coworkers, a slight elevation on the charisma cluster – neither too little nor too much – predicted the highest levels of rated effectiveness. The Figure tells the story.

Coworkers indicated that those managers with scores slightly above the average in a large sample of working adults (i.e., about the 60^th percentile) were seen as the most effective leaders. After that, more charisma predicted decreasing effectiveness. In contrast, the higher the self-ratings for charisma, the higher the self-rating for effectiveness.  But other people are always the best judge of a person’s performance.

At about the 70^th percentile on the charismatic cluster, coworkers start to see the dark side of charisma—where confidence become arrogance, risk-taking gets reckless, social presence looks melodramatic, and strong vision becomes ungrounded grandiosity. But these highly charismatic leaders can’t see the downside, and in fact see themselves as extraordinarily effective leaders.Rob Kaiser (a coauthor) refers to this divergence of opinion at the highest levels of charisma as “the gradient of delusion.”

The moral of this story will be familiar to readers of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Leaders with just the right amount of charisma, neither too little nor too much, are the most effective. Some charisma is desirable; without any spark, leaders lack the confidence, charm, vision, and flair needed to inspire others. But when it comes to charisma, there is clearly such a thing as too much of a good thing.

This research has two practical implications. First, we should never rely on self-assessments of effectiveness or workplace performance. Reputation is where the action is and other people own your reputation.

Second, those working in coaching or leadership development need to develop strategies for bringing highly charismatic leaders back to reality. Coworker feedback is obviously one way to help charismatics calibrate their excessively rosy self-appraisals. Charismatic leaders can also benefit from working with a partner who provides a practical foil to their unrealistic self-beliefs. Such people need to be trusted by the larger-than-life charismatic; they need the insight not to be taken in by the charismatic’s charm and they need to be able to steer charismatic leaders back on track—and prevent them from going over the edge.

*This is a guest blog post written by Nicholas Emler, Ph.D., a Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Surrey.

Leadership was for too long grievously neglected by mainstream psychology, so it is good to see the topic more regularly getting serious scholarly attention; there is now a substantial body of informative research, in marked contrast to the situation 25 years ago. However, not all the scholarly attention has been beneficial. My concern on this occasion relates to some recent work (Antonakis, 2018) on the link between leadership and charisma.

Antonakis makes useful points in this article, noting that charisma has suffered from fuzziness of definition.  And his interpretation of charisma as persuasive signalling is an interesting route to rigour in research on charisma. However, the idea that successful leaders use rhetorical and presentational devices to enhance their persuasive impact on audiences is not new (see Atkinson, 1984) and many of the insights of this earlier work have clearly been absorbed by professional politicians. Witness the now ubi quitous use of projection screens to allow speakers apparently to maintain eye contact with audiences while actually reading from a script.

Antonakis correctly observes that a leader judged charismatic by one audience can be seen as a dangerous demagogue by another but this does beg a very large question. Bad leadership can do immense damage, far beyond the effects of even the most energetic criminal individual. Promoting charisma as a desirable (and trainable) quality – the line taken by Antonakis –  does nothing to address this. Indeed, quite to the contrary. Archie Brown, in his excellent The Myth of the Strong Leader, observes that charisma “is often dangerous and frequently overrated”. And the evidence that he is correct – on both points – is beginning to stack up. Boards of publicly traded companies have for some years supposed that they should appoint CEOs with charisma. The people they appoint following this dictum may deliver short-term profits but in the longer run they create chaos and ruin.

Having charisma and being persuasive can get you elected or promoted but does nothing to guarantee that you have either good judgment or the moral qualities needed successfully to meet the challenges of leadership. This relates to an important distinction, now recognised in the leadership literature, but neglected in Antonakis’s article, between leadership emergence and leadership effectiveness. Qualities of the person associated with one are barely related to qualities associated with the other. Interestingly, and perhaps surprisingly, among the qualities that research is beginning to identify as predictive of effectiveness is humility (Owens, Johnson, & Mitchell, 2013; Vera, & Rodriguez-Lopez, 2004). Humility goes with recognising one does not have all the answers – necessarily true of anyone providing leadership to a complex enterprise – and being willing to seek and listen to advice. Hitler, Musssolini, and the reverend Jim Jones may all have had charisma but none was burdened with humility (and the same looks to be true of some current world leaders).

Persuasive signalling matters for the reception and impact of one’s message but surely what should matter far more is the content of the message.

References

Antonakis, J. (2018) Moving psychology forward – with charisma.  The Psychologist, March, 44-47.

Atkinson, M. (1984). Our masters’ voices: The language and body language of politics.  London: Routledge.

Brown, A. (2014).  The myth of the strong leader: Political leadership in the modern age.  London: The Bodley Head.

Owens, B. P., Johnson, M. D., & Mitchell, T.R. (2013). Expressed humility in organizations: Implications for performance, teams, and leadership. Organization Science, 24, 1517-1538.

Vera, D., & Rodriguez-Lopez, A. (2004). Humility as a source of competitive advantage. Organizational Dynamics, 33(4), 393-408.

When organizations are working to identify new leaders, too often they gravitate toward those who are charismatic, narcissistic, and inappropriately self-confident. These individuals tend to emerge because they are well-liked and masters in the art of office politics. However, decades of data and research prove that people with these characteristics are extremely ineffective leaders, and can ultimately destroy the organizations they have been chosen to serve.

On the contrary, leaders with humility combined with the appropriate amount of self-confidence have proven to be extremely effective in leadership roles because of their ability to build and maintain high-performing teams. Unfortunately, they are often overlooked by their superiors due to their inability to emerge in most organizational settings.

In this video, Bob Hogan discusses the importance of humility in leaders and how Hogan Assessments is preparing to help organizations across the globe to identify future leaders who are humble, competent, and effective.

Conventional wisdom suggests that the most charismatic leaders are also the best leaders. Charismatic leaders have, for instance, the ability to inspire others toward higher levels of performance and to instill deep levels of commitment, trust, and satisfaction. As a result, they are generally perceived by their subordinates to be more effective, compared with less charismatic leaders.

But our research shows that while having at least a moderate level of charisma is important, having too much may hinder a leader’s effectiveness. We conducted three studies, involving 800 business leaders globally and around 7,500 of their superiors, peers, and subordinates. Leaders occupied different managerial levels, ranging from supervisors to general managers. Our paper is forthcoming in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

First, it’s important to understand what charisma is. Traditional models of charismatic leadership state that charisma is not a personality trait, but simply exists in the eye of the beholder. In other words, charisma is attributed to someone, as opposed to being grounded in one’s personality.

However, the observation that people tend to agree in their perceptions of others’ charisma levels suggests that it is not only a matter of attribution, and that this agreement might result from a personality-based foundation underlying these perceptions. So the first goal of our research was to establish a measure of charismatic personality.

We gave leaders the Hogan Development Survey (HDS), a personality inventory specifically designed for work applications, and looked at how they scored on four personality tendencies: bold, colorful, mischievous, and imaginative. More-charismatic leaders score high on these traits, which is reflected in their high self-confidence, dramatic flair, readiness to test the limits, and expansive visionary thinking.

Next, we conducted a study to confirm this cluster of traits as a valid measure of charismatic personality. Using a sample of 204 business leaders, we showed that charismatic personality related to subordinates’ perceptions of charismatic leadership. So leaders with a highly charismatic personality, as measured with HDS charisma, were also perceived to be highly charismatic by their subordinates. Using an archival data set from 1998 on a sample of 156 people, we further showed that HDS charisma levels could be predicted by people’s charismatic behaviors (for example, being energetic, assertive, and generating enthusiasm).

Our second goal was to investigate the relationship between charismatic personality and leader effectiveness. In a second study, 306 leaders (65% of them men) provided HDS self-ratings of their charismatic personality, while their coworkers provided ratings of their overall effectiveness using a 10-point rating scale, where 5 is adequate and 10 is outstanding. Taken together, 4,345 of their coworkers participated in this study: 666 superiors; 1,659 peers; and 2,020 subordinates. An average of 14 people rated each leader in terms of overall effectiveness.

Consistent with our expectations, we found that as charisma increased, so did perceived effectiveness — but only up to a certain point. As charisma scores continued to increase beyond the 60th percentile, which is just above the average score relative to the general population of working adults, perceived effectiveness started to decline. This trend was consistent across the three observer groups (subordinates, peers, and supervisors).

We also asked the leaders to evaluate their own effectiveness. As shown below, the more charismatic the leaders were, the higher they rated their own effectiveness. This discrepancy between self-perceptions and observer ratings is in line with other research demonstrating that leaders with high self-esteem typically overrate their performance on a variety of criteria.

In a third study, we tested whether the effects of charismatic personality on effectiveness could be explained by looking at specific leader behaviors. To test this, we asked 287 business leaders (81% men) to rate their charismatic personality, and an average of 11 coworkers — including supervisors, peers, and subordinates — to rate each leader in terms of overall effectiveness. Additionally, coworkers now also rated leaders on two pairs of opposing leader-behavior dimensions: the extent to which they were forceful and enabling (tapping into the interpersonal behavior dimensions, or how they led), and the extent to which they were strategic and operational (representing the organizational dimensions, or what they led).

Although we did not find significant relationships between charisma and the interpersonal behavior dimensions, we found that highly charismatic leaders were perceived to engage in more strategic behavior and less operational behavior. But how can this explain lower effectiveness ratings for the most charismatic?

One explanation is that the costs associated with the desired trait (charisma) eventually come to outweigh its benefits. For highly charismatic leaders, we expected that the costs associated with a lack of operational behavior would come to outweigh the benefits delivered by strategic behavior when a certain level of charisma is exceeded. And that’s exactly what we found: Highly charismatic leaders may be strategically ambitious, but this comes at the expense of getting day-to-day work activities executed in a proper manner, which can hurt perceived effectiveness. They failed, for example, in managing the day-to-day operations needed to implement their big strategic vision and in taking a methodical approach to getting things done in the near term. Further analysis showed that for leaders with lower levels of charisma, the opposite was true: They were found to be less effective because they lacked strategic behavior. For example, they did not spend enough time on long-term planning, and failed in taking a big-picture perspective, questioning the status quo, and encouraging innovation.

In terms of practical implications, our findings suggest that leaders should be aware of the potential drawbacks of being highly charismatic. Although it’s difficult to draw a precise line between “just enough” and “too much” charisma, these are a few traits to look out for that can influence one’s effectiveness. Self-confidence, for instance, may turn into overconfidence and narcissism in highly charismatic leaders, while risk tolerance and persuasiveness may start to translate into manipulative behavior. Further, the enthusiastic and entertaining nature of charisma may turn into attention-seeking behaviors that distract the organization from its mission, and extreme creativity may make highly charismatic leaders think and act in fanciful, eccentric ways.

For those whose charisma may be above optimal, coaching and development programs aimed at managing potential operational weaknesses, enhancing self-awareness, and improving self-regulation can be useful. Highly charismatic leaders would also benefit from receiving feedback from their coworkers on their effectiveness. That way, any gap between their perception and the perceptions of others will become clear. In contrast, coaching programs for leaders low on charisma might focus more on boosting their strategic behavior.

In sum, we found support for the idea that a leader can be too charismatic. Our findings suggest that highly charismatic leaders are perceived to be less effective, not for interpersonal reasons like self-centeredness but for business-related reasons that specifically relate to a lack of operational leader behavior.

We do want to point out that we didn’t include situational factors in our study, which could influence the strength and shape of the relationship between leader charisma and effectiveness. Under certain conditions, such as in low-stress situations, this relationship may be strictly linear (“the more charisma the better”). However, we believe that high-stress and high-pressure situations are rather typical for a “normal” leadership context, enhancing the likelihood of finding a too-much-of-a-good-thing effect. Additional studies will be important to further investigate the specific conditions under which charisma is desirable or not.

This article was orginally published in Harvard Business Review on September 26, 2017, and was authored by Jasmine Vergauwe, Bart Wille, Joeri Hofmans, Robert B. Kaiser, and Filip De Fruyt.