Leadership, constructive and destructive

I study what makes some leaders constructive and others destructive, and I look for the causes in personality and self-control more than in leadership style.

With Michael Collins I proposed a process model of self-regulation and leadership (The Leadership Quarterly, 2015). It describes how a leader’s capacity to pay attention, and their negative emotion, influence whether they lead constructively or destructively. Earlier work with Elizabeth Hobman, Nerina Jimmieson and Robin Martin on transformational leadership won the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology best leadership paper of the year.

A recent paper with Christian Criado-Perez, Ben Walker and Anar Purvee looks at a quiet form of poor leadership: failing to reward people who do good work (Australian Journal of Management, 2025). Across three studies, leaders who were more disinhibited were more likely to lead this way. One study measured disinhibition with a laboratory go/no-go task. Another used ratings from 273 employees of 91 junior managers in a non-Western organisation.

I have also asked how much current leadership theory adds to older ideas. Two papers in Personality and Individual Differences compare transformational leadership with the Roman idea of gravitas (2020) and test Pliny the Younger’s imperial virtues against modern personality models (2021). With Jonathan Roberts I examined how transformational and narcissistic leaders behave in different contexts (2022).