De Vries (2018) was the first personality researcher to popularise the Three Nightmare Traits of Leadership, derived from inversions of the HEXACO model: Dishonesty, Disagreeableness, and Carelessness. Building on this foundation, the present research extends prior work on leaders’ nightmare traits (De Vries, 2018) by proposing Five Nightmare Leadership Reputations: Unreliability, Antagonism, Volatility, Detachment, and Conformity (cf. Harms, 2022; Horney, 1950; Krueger & Markon, 2014). These reputations reflect how leaders are perceived by others, rather than identity-based trait reports, and capture interpersonal patterns such as self-serving, oppositional, emotionally reactive, withdrawn, and overly accommodating behaviours.

The first objective of this study was to develop a conceptually and empirically grounded model of the Five Nightmare Reputations, operationalised through adjective-based observer ratings across relationship contexts. Agreement across raters will be examined to evaluate the extent to which these reputational patterns demonstrate consistency across observers. This approach responds to calls for greater methodological diversity in personality research, particularly in integrating identity and reputation perspectives (Funder, 1995; Connelly & McAbee, 2024).

Socioanalytic theory (Hogan, 1982; Hogan & Blickle, 2018) conceptualises leadership as a social process shaped by two fundamental motives: Getting Along and Getting Ahead. These motives underpin leaders' beliefs, thoughts, emotions, and actions, which shape their reputations over time. Reputation (i.e., how leaders are collectively perceived and experienced by others) is a key indicator of leadership effectiveness and has meaningful implications for organisational outcomes (Hogan & Hogan, 2025).

To provide a structure for understanding reputational risk, the study’s second objective was to examine nightmare leadership reputations within the Socioanalytic Leadership Circumplex, organised around the dimensions of Getting Along and Getting Ahead (Van Lill et al., 2025). Using data from the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) and the Hogan Development Survey (HDS) alongside observer-rated descriptors, reputational risks were located within this circumplex using the Structural Summary Method (Zimmermann & Wright, 2017). This approach enabled different forms of maladaptive leadership to be compared and differentiated with respect to core social motives.

Findings demonstrate that nightmare leadership does not take a single form but varies meaningfully in how leaders relate to others at home and at work based on their personality tendencies. Implications for leadership assessment, selection, and development are discussed, including how a socioanalytic circumplex lens may support clearer identification and differentiation of reputational risk.