Terrell Owens is, plainly, a narcissist. He can't even apologize to the
Philadelphia Eagles without talking about himself. The Eagles don't buy his
apology and have concluded that he should play football somewhere else. Better
yet, maybe he should be self-employed.
Narcissism is not a crime. If that's Owens's worst offense, why are the
Eagles dealing so harshly with him? Owens and his agent, Drew Rosenhaus, seem
baffled that the Eagles are unforgiving. They have filed a union grievance, and
protest that he has not been arrested, he doesn't have a rap sheet, nor has he
broken any rules. But that's how fed up the Eagles are with Owens -- they'd
apparently sooner keep a felon. Until Owens understands that narcissism is
possibly as damaging to a team as criminal behavior, he'll be a detriment to any
organization he plays for.
The Eagles are perfectly right to get rid of Owens, as any expert in
workplace dynamics knows. "He's useless to them," said Richard Boyatzis, an
author for the Harvard Business School Press, and a former CEO who is professor
of organizational behavior at Case Western Reserve University. It's tempting to
look at Owens's receiving statistics and rippling physique, at his talent,
energy and abilities, and say that surely the 4-4 Eagles are better off with him
than without him. But that would be to underestimate the problem that is Terrell
Owens. "He's not really a great player," Boyatzis said. "He's technically
proficient. But great players can play with others." Owens can't get along with
anybody. And while that may not be a contractual violation or a crime, it's
intolerable.
Terms like "chemistry" and the saying, "There is no 'I' in team" are
idiotically vague bromides. But Owens's unbalanced ego has a very specific and
diagnosable effect on others. Narcissistic behavior in the workplace has been
studied before, and it's often discussed in terms of "malignancy" for a good
reason, because it has a tendency to infect entire buildings. Management experts
and prosecutors alike have theorized that corporate narcissism was at least
partly responsible for the abuses at Tyco, WorldCom and Enron.
What happened between Owens and the Eagles "was so utterly
predictable," said Prof. David Carter, executive director of USC's Sports
Business Institute. "What happens with a lot of athletes is they become the most
high-profile employee in the organization and there's a sliding scale of
tolerance where the coaches or the managers give those athletes, just like star
sales people, just enough rope to hang themselves. And by the time they've hung
themselves, they've really gone a long way to impacting the morale of the rest
of the organization, and done a fine job of contaminating the company in the
marketplace."
When is a team great? Why do some product development teams come up
with fantastic ideas while others bicker and waste millions of dollars? Some
doctor-nurse teams work especially well in operating rooms, and others don't.
What's the difference?
Research is very clear that great teams are a function of harmony.
Boyatzis discusses it in terms of "resonance" and "dissonance." An easy example
is an orchestra. The members have an overall positive tone, a sense of efficacy,
and are attuned to each other. This gives them not just resonance but
resilience. They have the ability to adapt, and rebound. Resonance is as much an
atmosphere as anything, and it feeds on itself. "This degree of resonance
happens at all different levels, and the least degree is conscious," Boyatzis
said. "A lot of it is unconscious."
For instance, it has been found that on really effective teams in an
operating room, doctors and nurses tend to fall into similar pulse
rates.
But when you have a dissonant player, "They actually spread toxicity,"
Boyatzis said. The most basic effect of that is discord, and the more subtle
effect is a loss of resiliency. Organizations don't adapt or rebound, but
deteriorate. If you think about it as a body, when your stomach decides to go on
holiday and act differently, you feel ill, and other parts of the body are set
off."
Owens is not solely to blame for the Eagles' deterioration from a Super
Bowl team to 4-4 -- there are other factors, such as injuries to quarterback
Donovan McNabb. But Owens certainly is responsible for a general
malaise.
Owens doesn't seem to grasp the concept of resonance, unless it has to
do with the sound of his own voice. Nor has he shown he can sublimate himself to
the team more than temporarily. He was divisive in San Francisco, where he
undermined his coach, Steve Mariucci, and slurred his quarterback Jeff Garcia.
In just a year with the Eagles, he has divided them, too. He has been malicious
about McNabb, carped about his lavish contract, and reportedly engaged in a
locker room fistfight. Owens may or may not have the full-blown personality
disorder known as narcissism, but that's not the point. You don't have to be a
clinical case to inflict narcissistic behaviors on co-workers: an unrealistic
sense of self-importance, an insatiable need for admiration, and a lack of
regard for the feelings or needs of others.
A football team is intensely interdependent -- it's really more of an
organism than an organization. Owens's brand of narcissistic behavior is perhaps
especially virulent in that framework. According to Sam Vaknin, author of
"Malignant Self Love -- Narcissism Revisited," narcissists are disruptive on
several levels. They are unable to abide criticism, they work autonomously,
refuse to succumb to guidelines. And they provoke intense emotional
counter-reactions from colleagues. "They mentally monopolize," he said. No
doubt, that will sound familiar to the Eagles.
In Vaknin's opinion, true narcissists are basically "unemployable."
That's why many of them are self-employed, or work themselves into situations
where they are sole decision-makers. You see a lot of them, he remarks, in
politics.
But you see a lot of them in the pro leagues too -- more and more all
the time. The NFL is an increasingly narcissistic system, constructed for the
entertainment of a narcissistic society in which notoriety is preferable to
obscurity. What's interesting about Owens is that there may be more like him
coming, because he is what the league is breeding. After all, the Eagles signed
him and paid him richly, knowing how he behaved in San Francisco. Another team
will be eager to sign him, although perhaps not for quite as much money. "In
sports the scale of tolerance depends on how badly you need to fill a gap in the
lineup," Carter said.
The pity of it is that Owens has so much potential -- he has abundant
ambition and dynamism -- if only he could be cured of self- absorption. CEOs
have learned to alter their behaviors over time, according to Boyatzis, but it
requires willingness and a good human resources department. And NFL teams are
more focused on short-term performance than long-term personal improvement. "The
problem is they're not really in the business of [that kind of] coaching,"
Boyatzis said.
The next NFL team that signs Owens should realize it's going to have to
invest more in him than just a paycheck.
