How to Understand Elon Musk's Polarizing Leadership Style

Source: Sarah Kurfess / Unsplash

Elon Musk’s decision to lay off half of Twitter’s workforce has been followed by nearly 1200 employee resignations. No matter what you think about Musk as a leader, there is no debating the fact that Twitter is in troubled waters.

A recent study published in the academic journal Personality and Individual Differences can help us understand how employees might view Musk.

According to the research, polarizing leaders like Musk can be grouped into two categories: transformational leaders and pseudo-transformational leaders.

• Transformational leaders are pro-social and inspire people to achieve exceptional outcomes. They create work environments where employees are motivated, intellectually stimulated, and recognized. They build work cultures that have a strong sense of morality.
• Pseudo-transformational leaders, on the other hand, are perceived to be charismatic because of their grandiose rhetoric and heightened levels of self-confidence. However, they are primarily motivated by self-interest. They can be self-aggrandizing and exploitative. Workplaces presided over by pseudo-transformational leaders tend to be rife with unethical behavior such as manipulative communication, excessive control, and a general insensitivity to the needs of others.

Where does Musk fit in? In the case of Twitter, the jury is still out.

A crisis, according to the research, is when a leader’s true colors are brought to light. Here’s how the two types of leaders differ in crisis situations:

• Transformational leaders take risks during a crisis to steer the organization out of it. They usually risk blame and reputational damage for the greater good of the organization.
• Pseudo-transformational leaders, on the other hand, are more likely to take risks when the health of the organization is robust. The risk is mostly a ploy to attract attention from important people within and outside the company.

Keeping the research in mind, here are two ways we can look at what’s happening at Twitter.

1. Musk overtook Twitter to mitigate the platform’s spambot problem and turn it into a digital town square, free of censorship, that upholds free speech. These are inspirational and strong moral agendas. He is also taking big risks to turn these goals into a reality by taking a "be there or be square" approach and reconfiguring Twitter from the ground up. Twitter usage is at an all-time high and Musk’s remaining workforce is working around the clock to realize his vision for the organization. Might this mean that he is a one-of-a-kind transformational leader who is facing flak from people who don’t have his foresight?
2. Firing the old guard, rewiring the product, and tweeting about his hostile takeover could also be interpreted as classic narcissistic behavior. Musk did not build Twitter, he bought it. Is his pseudo-transformational agenda a version of carving one’s initials on something that one did not create? The Twitter crisis was also, at least partially, manufactured by him. The consensus among the employees who were fired, including Twitter’s former CEO, and the employees who resigned is clear: Musk’s actions showed no respect to the ones who created and managed Twitter in the first place.

Conclusion

Musk’s optimism, passion for innovation, and audacious risk-taking have fueled his unprecedented success. But the same qualities that made him who he is could very well lead to his undoing if he lets ego, tone-deafness, and narcissism steer his decision-making.

While the full picture will eventually come into view, it is interesting to see how adjusting one’s perspective can make the same person look like a hero and a villain in the same situation.