The Psychology of Leadership

The purpose of this research is to examine Leaders, Fools, and Impostors: Essays on the Psychology of Leadership by Kets de Vries. The plan of the research will be to set forth in general terms the thesis of the book, and then to provide a summary of the ideas contained in each of the essays in the book, with a view toward evaluating whether it could be recommended for further research on the topic of leadership.

In this collection of essays, Kets de Vries takes a psychological approach to the study of leadership as a feature of the "psychodynamics of organizations" (xiv). It is not too much to say that the approach is a combination of psychobiography and psychohistory, for he provides numerous specific real-life examples of how leaders have failed the test of leadership owing to psychologically motivated actions, attitudes, and behaviors. Indeed, Kets de Vries specifically asserts that so-called "rational approaches to management" (xiv) are just plain wrong because they leave out the human factor. Drawing on clinical methods and theories, notably Freud's view that much human behavior has its source in the unconscious (hence irrational), Kets de Vries shows that reconstruction and evaluation of the facts of behavior can be traced to unconscious motivation. The reason that this seems a valid subject for study is that the consequences of the behavior of leaders, proceeding on account of power and authority, can be visited on subordinates and on the structure of organizations th

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," based on the Babylonian idea of making the punishment fit the crime, leaders who do not receive the news of their limitations may actually initiate as it were "taliations" for imagined wrongs or to forestall retaliation for wrongs they may have inflicted on others. Other leaders may make a project of leaving a legacy, described as an "edifice complex" (52), which may not have a good organizational effect. Retirement planning as an organizational strategy is part of the emotional reckoning as well, inasmuch as organizations need to balance exploitation of the benefit of experienced leadership while also recognizing the need to rejuvenate the organizations with younger ideas (58). In "Dead Souls: Understanding Emotional Illiteracy," Kets de Vries touches on the potential toxicity of leaders who do not honor or cannot recognize the importance and role of emotion in organizational life. The diagnosis of the "organization man" as embedded in the impersonal, ritualized structures of a bureaucracy (76-77) is really a diagnosis of the effect of overwhelming structures on individual psychological well-being. Leaders who are too detached (79-80), absorbed by systems instead of people on the line (80-81), and ostensibly friendly and enga

Category: Psychology - T