Assessing Leadership: A View from the Dark Side

This article concerns leadership effectiveness studied from the reverse angle. We review the literature on managerial derailment and propose a taxonomy of derailment factors. We then describe an inventory designed to assess these factors, provide some evidence regarding the psychometric features of the inventory, and some evidence regarding its validity. We suggest that the base rate for managerial incompetence in any organization is quite high, and we propose our inventory is a useful device for management development – because it focuses on dysfunctional dispositions known to be associated with failure as a manager.