Emotional extraction leadership: Narcissistic power, emotional labour, and identity harm in professional work

Leadership research has increasingly acknowledged the destructive consequences of narcissistic leadership, yet existing work largely conceptualises these effects as behavioural excesses or attitudinal deficits. This paper advances a different argument: that narcissistic leadership operates through a distinctive emotional mechanism that systematically reallocates emotional regulation, affirmation, and identity maintenance from leaders to followers. We introduce Emotional Extraction Leadership (EEL) as a process-based conceptual framework describing leadership contexts in which followers are compelled to absorb, manage, and stabilise leaders’ emotional needs under conditions of asymmetric power. Drawing on an integrative theory-building review across leadership, emotion, and identity literatures, we theorise how emotional labour becomes not merely an occupational demand but a form of emotionally structured governance. Over time, such extraction generates identity harm: the erosion of professional self-concept, moral coherence, and agentic voice, extending beyond commonly examined outcomes such as burnout or dissatisfaction. By reframing emotional labour as a site of power rather than coping, this paper contributes a process model linking narcissistic power, emotional regulation displacement, and identity harm. The concept of EEL offers a generative framework for rethinking destructive leadership, foregrounding emotion as a mechanism of control and opening new directions for empirical and ethical inquiry in leadership studies.