UC Berkeley expert available for insights on narcissistic leadership. Like carriers of a virus, narcissistic leaders “infect” the cultures of their organizations, leading to dramatically lower levels of collaboration and integrity.

Biography :
Jennifer Chatman is a world-renowned researcher, teacher & consultant on leveraging organizational culture for firm performance and leading high-performance teams. Chatman is the Paul J. Cortese Distinguished Professor of Management and a faculty member in the Management of Organizations (MORS) Group at Berkeley Haas.

In her research, teaching, and consulting work, she focuses on how organizations can leverage culture for strategic success and how diverse teams can optimize performance. Her award-winning research has shown, for example, how emphasizing innovation in the context of a strong culture increases firms’ financial success, how narcissistic leaders create organizational cultures lower in collaboration and integrity, and how norms to cooperate can cause members to blur differences among them, even if those differences are useful for group performance—suggesting that collaboration should be calibrated in diverse teams.

Chatman is the Co-Director of the Berkeley Culture Initiative, the Assistant Dean for Learning Strategies at the Haas School of Business, an Editor for the journal Research in Organizational Behavior, and runs the Leading High Performance Cultures executive education program. She has served in many other leadership roles at Haas and UC Berkeley over the years. Chatman earned her PhD at Berkeley Haas, and her BA in Psychology from UC Berkeley.

Quote :“We have a hard time distinguishing the features that make for a good leader from the features that are associated with narcissism. The whole point of an organization is to try to do something together”.,"Getting people to join a multilevel marketing company usually involves a small initial hurdle, maybe they have some success selling a little bit and they buy a little bit more. So there's a kind of escalation cycle that occurs".,"Jargon masks real meaning. People use it as a substitute for thinking hard and clearly about their goals and the direction that they want to give others".