The Root Cause of Destructive Leadership Often Lies in the Leader’s Personality
Source: Äri-IT Autumn 2025
Author: Alo Naelapea. Lead Consultant/Partner, Adera Executive Search
The Titanic Submersible Tragedy and the Dark Side of Leadership: How Stockton Rush’s Risk-Taking Offers a Critical Lesson in Management Psychology
On June 18, 2023, the world was stunned by a tragic accident: the submersible Titan, operated by deep-sea expedition company OceanGate, imploded under pressure while en route to the Titanic wreck. The disaster claimed the lives of all passengers and the submersible’s captain, Stockton Rush. Rush, who co-founded OceanGate in 2009, had been dubbed the ”modern-day Jacques Cousteau.”
Who was Stockton Rush as a person? While many viewed him as a passionate innovator, close colleagues suggested that Rush saw safety rules and precautions as obstacles to genuine progress. His adventurism sometimes made him reckless, leading him to disregard regulations and guidelines that could have prevented such a tragedy.
When Failure Isn’t Due to Skills, But the Leader’s ”Dark Side”
The study of leadership failures and their connection to personality traits was pioneered in the 1980s by management psychologist Robert Hogan. Many organizations hire experienced, smart, charismatic, and ambitious individuals, only to later discover that the new leader fails to meet the expectations of both the employer and the team. In the worst-case scenario, the leader leaves behind a ruined company and burned-out employees.
Hogan noted that the cause of failure is often not the leader’s professional skills, but their character—specifically, the part of their character that emerges on their worst days (or when they aren’t paying attention to their own behavior). This is the part that team members, rather than the immediate supervisor, are often the first to notice. A recent Google search for ”My boss is…” showed results like ”…a sadist,” ”…a narcissistic bully,” and ”…bullying me.” Hogan calls this aspect of character the ”Dark Side of the Personality.” These traits are unproductive patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior that have a destructive impact on relationships, team morale, and the leader’s career.
It is entirely possible for individuals, especially young, new leaders who haven’t yet received sufficient feedback, to be completely unaware of some of these dark traits in themselves.
The Shadow of Charisma
Many dark traits can be highly effective in certain fields or roles, yet they prove unproductive in team management or personal relationships. For example, a moderately paranoid mindset can be beneficial in politics, and perfectionism can thrive in quality control. However, in team leadership, constant suspicion can erode the working atmosphere, and perfectionism can lead to micromanagement and excessive focus on detail. Thus, context and goals become crucial.
Two leadership candidates may appear quite similar in behavior and nature on their best days, but they can differ totally on their worst days. The first might withdraw, disappear from the team, and stop answering calls and emails; the second might become arrogant and paranoid, blaming everyone else for failures.
Unchecked unproductive behaviors can come at a very high price for an organization. While an entry-level manager might cause a poor work environment and mistrust, a mid-level manager might make poor tactical decisions and impede information flow. At the executive level, unproductive patterns lead to wrong strategic choices, overestimation of company capabilities, and waste of resources. Stockton Rush’s propensity to take shortcuts on safety-related matters, as described earlier, ultimately led him and his clients to a watery grave.
Some dark traits can make a person charismatic and charming. They often do well in social settings and dating (though the opinion may change after a year or two of living together). In job interviews, they speak of vision, setting high goals, business growth, and determination to deliver results—messages interviewers love to hear. Interviewers, even experienced ones, have an unconscious tendency to equate confidence with competence. However, charisma often has a shadow: the confidence, brilliance, risk-taking, and charm that initially attract people eventually turn into arrogance, manipulation, carelessness, self-centeredness, and egoism. Cults and their magnetic leaders are a prime example. My former psychology professor, Toomas Niit, always advised: ”If you like someone too much, ask yourself why.” This is a vital question when selecting key organizational employees.
Strong Culture and Conscious Selection as Anchors
When a critical mass of employees with certain dark traits enters a team, ”anchors” start to form. For instance, a team dominated by individuals with narcissistic traits may suffer from power struggles, hidden agendas, bullying, and rushed decisions. Teams composed of people with a paranoid mindset primarily see a breakdown in trust and communication.
Although large corporations attempt to minimize risks stemming from key individuals’ personalities through principles of governance and controlling, one should never underestimate a single individual’s capacity to derail things.
More broadly, the emergence of employees’ dark traits (e.g., paranoia, extreme perfectionism, passive-aggressiveness, manipulation, arrogance, procrastination) can be suppressed by a strong organizational culture, clear rules of conduct, and the willingness of leaders to identify and address unproductive behavior patterns. Ultimately, however, everything begins with personnel selection: Do we have the knowledge and skills to identify these ”time-bombs” in candidates’ psychological profiles? This question is particularly crucial in the context of selecting political leaders, given the price nations and peoples have paid for wrong choices.
Today, it’s quite possible to successfully assess leadership-related risks in candidates. We have excellent science-based tools available for this purpose. Dark traits may not surface during job interviews; paradoxically, they might even be perceived as strengths. In case of doubt, it is essential to collect references from a candidate’s previous employers to better understand their leadership style, collaboration skills, behavior under pressure, and ability to build and lead teams.