Targeting Destructive Narcissism: A New Approach for Identifying and Eliminating Toxic Senior Leaders in the U.S. Air Force

Air Force officers are under strict obligation to uphold the services three core values of Integrity First, Service before Self, and Excellence in All We Do. While a majority of senior Air Force officers enforce the core values, there are some which threaten to imperil public confidence in the military as an institution. A senior leaders departure from the core values, including a breach of character, is likely indicative of toxicity within that officer. Inevitably, toxic leadership is deleterious to an organization, eroding unit cohesion and esprit de corps while destroying trust. One can trace the etiology of toxic leadership to individuals possessing destructive narcissistic behaviors. Narcissism, like toxic leadership, operates along a continuum. There appears to be both a correlative and causal relationship between more pathological manifestations of narcissism and malevolent toxic behaviors. There also appears to be a correlation between higher stress levels, narcissism and toxic leadership. Despite an increase in toxicity among senior officers, the Air Force remains mostly ambivalent towards dealing with the phenomenon. This paper offers provocative recommendations for combating toxicity, centered on the need for the Air Force to implement new officer personnel policies that impact recruitment, promotion and command selection methodologies. At the cornerstone of these policy recommendations, the paper advocates psychological testing of officer candidates during pre-accessioning and iterative testing for on-boarded officers that would identify toxic characteristics. Recommendations also include complementing psychological testing with other assessment tools to provide a holistic view of an officers propensity for toxicity. Finally, the paper recommends that all officers, at various phases of their career, receive indoctrination in emotional intelligence awareness as a means to self-identify and correct narcissistic and toxic behaviors.