Realistic Egocentrism: Caring Leadership Through an Evolutionary

Romanticizing leaders as caring pastors usually benefits followers, by having someone to protect them or to blame if things go wrong. But, why would leaders want to play along and pretend they are carers? This is a theory-building manuscript, which uses a revelatory context, to explore caring leadership from a novel angle, using evolutionary theory to identify an anomaly within caring leadership theory. The revelatory context used for this study was English higher education. Here, 47 interviews were done with government/organizational leaders, including 24 university Chief Executives (i.e. university Presidents). The revelatory context evidenced that leaders sometimes develop cognitions about their impotence to control things. Thus, leaders play along the caring leadership delusion, because it is a mechanism for them to deny their impotence. The paper expands caring leadership theory, by suggesting that this is not exclusively about authentic caring, but also about convergent denial and realistic egocentrism.