The Elephant in the Boardroom

Citation

Hughes, L.W. (2011), "The Elephant in the Boardroom", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 32 No. 1, pp. 101-102. https://doi.org/10.1108/lodj.2011.32.1.101.3

Not since Kets de Vries's (1985, 2006) various works on the neurotic leader has the discipline of leadership seen a useful psychological profile and explanation of why certain dysfunctional personality types find themselves in, and largely fail in roles of leadership. Adrian Furnham's new book, The Elephant in the Boardroom, provides leadership scholars and practitioners with a useful guidebook for identifying and understanding why some leaders behave as they do. The topic is complex, but Furnham, an experienced author, without diluting the message, has provided a useful, interesting, and often enlightening treatment of individual differences and how they explain leadership derailment. One possible appeal of the book is that all readers, unless they have been hiding in Plato's “psychic cave” (Morgan, 2006) have experienced some of these phenomena firsthand.

Elephant is structured within four main parts. In Part 1, the reader is provided with an overview of research on dysfunctional leadership which includes a chapter on various negative personality types (e.g. narcissism, neuroticism, etc.). Part 2 contains three chapters, each of which profiles particular leadership pathologies such as the Machiavellian or Narcissistic leader. In Part 3, Furnham drills the discussion of dysfunctional leader into five specific disorders and the leadership styles relevant to each. An example is “schizotypal” leader and a description of that leader's social isolation and paranoid tendencies. Additionally, Part 3 contains a chapter on diagnosable personality disorders as a descriptive mechanism for leadership derailment. The book concludes with the fourth Part in which the discussion turns to leaders who, perhaps, should not have been leaders in the first place due to cognitive shortcomings. The final chapter provides a prescription for mitigating leadership dysfunction and derailment.

The book is well indexed and also contains a table of contents, a list of figures, and a bibliography. The format of the book allows for a fluid reading and easy reference to overlapping concepts presented elsewhere in the volume. The only criticism of its structure is that Chapter 9 (“The Cognitively Challenged Leader”) should have been included in Part 3 with the personality disorders, with the final chapter functioning as a conclusion. The way it is structured, Part 4 is a catch all for Chapter 9 and the final, concluding chapter.

Even the dustjacket of this book is symbolically apt. It shows a boardroom filled with executives busily interacting with each other in an apparent effort at productivity. But in the background is a large elephant with long, deadly looking tusks. Why do none of the depicted executives appear to notice the behemoth behind them? Because to do so could be damaging, when the elephant is a paranoid leader with the power to devastate careers and lives.

Despite the apparent deluge of poor leader behavior and decision‐making, dysfunctional leaders are not new to organizational environments. Elephant provides an interesting, and sometimes entertaining, view of why some leaders fail. Typically we attribute our failures to environmental factors, but Furnham offers evidence and an accessible description of how failure is sometimes in the psyche of those in charge. This book is an excellent addition to the reading list of any leadership seminar. Despite the push in the organizational sciences to focus on the positive, the reality and potential detriment of the negative should never be ignored.