Assessing leadership: A view from the dark side

This article concerns leadership effectiveness studied from the reverse ang le. We review the literature on managerial derailment and propose a taxonom y of derailment factors. We then describe an inventory designed to assess t hese factors, provide some evidence regarding the psychometric features of the inventory, and some evidence regarding its validity. We suggest that th e 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 w ith failure as a manager.