Superheroes and supervillains – why the cult of the CEO blinds us to reality

Take two fictional chief executives. Terry is clinging onto his job after President Obama lambasted him over a food poisoning scandal in the US division of his supermarket empire. Tony is winning plaudits for steadying the oil company he heads after his predecessor left under a cloud, and for his ambitious deepwater drilling project in the Gulf of Mexico.

In real life, of course, it's the other way around. On the day that BP boss Tony Hayward was being lambasted by Obama over his handling of the Deepwater oil spill, Sir Terry Leahy of Tesco announced his retirement, to virtually universal acclaim. The contrast between the superhero and the scapegoat could not have been more stark – but does one man really deserve to be worshipped while the other is vilified?

One school of thought is that society's view of Leahy and Hayward is two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, businessmen are idolised out of proportion to their real achievements; on the other, they are disproportionately blamed for the failures of the companies they lead. It taps into atavistic human urges to search for strong leaders, and to conduct witch-hunts against individuals seen to embody threats to the community.

Some argue that a "cult of the chief executive" has grown up whereby bosses are no longer expected to be mere managers, but charismatic leaders. Tributes are paid to the high priests of commerce in the form of bonuses, reinforcing the idea that they possess uniquely valuable personal skills and qualities.

Harvard academic Rakesh Khurana has argued in his book Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs that even the language around business leaders has taken on evangelical overtones. Contemporary bosses do not talk about the mundane task of making money, but about vision and values. They don't have job descriptions, but mission statements.

Problem is, it doesn't necessarily work. A recent study by academics Morten Hansen, Herminia Ibarra and Urs Peyer found that the fame or charisma of a chief executive bore little relation to high performance, and that "quiet" ones, such as Leahy, often performed the best. They collected data on 2,000 chief executives worldwide and found that although there were well-known names at the top of the list, including Steve Jobs of Apple, some relatively obscure individuals also featured in the upper ranks as a number of big names failed to do, despite their frequent appearances in the business pages. "Maybe it's time to redirect our attention and start celebrating and learning from a different crop of CEOs," the authors suggest.

Dull and anonymous isn't always good, though: there is no single template for a successful boss. Flamboyance might be undesirable in certain industries but acceptable in others, such as fashion. Sir Philip Green, the Top Shop entrepreneur, is a larger-than-life character who hangs around with Simon Cowell and Kate Moss, whereas Philip Green, boss of United Utilities, is a low-key manager who hangs around with his wife Judy. Both might be fine, but you wouldn't want to see them swap jobs.

Steve Tappin, co-author of The New Secrets of CEOs: 200 Global Chief Executives On Leading, has identified several styles of chief executive, ranging from the ambassadorial, for example, the well-connected Lord Browne, Hayward's predecessor at BP, to the nuts-and-bolts style of Leahy.

"Terry Leahy is very focused on execution. There is always a chance that something could go wrong but he has a firm grip on his business," Tappin says.

High-profile businessmen have fascinated the public for years, from John D Rockefeller, who became the richest man in modern history by founding Standard Oil, to Victorian soap baron Lord Lever. But these tended to be entrepreneurs who brought innovative products or processes to the market. There are still some of those, such as Bill Gates and Sir James Dyson, but most modern chief executives are not entrepreneurs, and are not bringing the world anything new. They run large, often mature companies that are highly complex and often span many countries and activities. The idea that they are the embodiment of their company, or that they are personally responsible for every success or failure, is an illusion.

But experts say the cult of the superhero boss is a persistent one, particularly at times of crisis, when people hanker for strong leadership. Professor Kim Turnbull James of Cranfield School of Management says: "I'm not quite sure I'd go so far as describing it as a religious cult but it is interesting that we expect CEOs to be accountable for every event that goes on even in the largest companies.

"We need positive role models who can be inspirational and give people confidence, and when organisations are very complicated people want to believe someone knows what is going on. The negative side is that we can turn this into a fantasy about heroes and magicians."

She argues celebrity culture has played a part, seeping into the world of business from reality TV programmes such as The Apprentice or Mary Queen of Shops. "There has been an eliding between business and celebrity, with people like Lord Sugar and Mary Portas. We do expect that people have magic solutions."

While many chief executives keep a modest profile and make a point of building strong teams, plenty of others collude in efforts to inflate their own image.

"They succumb to narcissism," says one leading City PR man. "They want to be worshipped and they believe their own hype. The irony about the way Tony Hayward is being vilified is that he seems a relatively down-to-earth character, while Lord Browne was the Sun King."

Tappin suggests that many chief executives are driven to succeed to compensate for trauma in their childhood. "Many of them come from backgrounds with adversity and parental loss, which means they have the DNA to super-achieve." It also means they may not have the personality to cope with public failure or to steer a company through a crisis.

He points to different cultural images of the chief executive. Anglo-American societies, which are highly unequal and style themselves as meritocracies, tend to focus on the individual; in Europe the emphasis is on professional managers; in the emerging economies of China and India, businesses concentrate on building relationships that foster strong teams, rather than hiring a star boss. "Businesses are global and complicated, so they need to go beyond the CEO. A better way of working is to build a fellowship style," Tappin says.

One problem for the egotistical executive is that most large firms do not, over the long term, grow faster than the economy as a whole, which means superhero status is hard to attain without taking on excessive risk.

Bosses are lionised for doing big deals, as Browne was for his expansion in the US, even though in the long run most mergers destroy value. The desire to seal a transforming deal can put a chief executive at odds with shareholders, as with Tidjane Thiam at the Prudential, whose job is hanging by a gossamer thread after he failed to push through a bid for AIA.

It's enough to make the most extrovert boss want to hide underneath the boardroom table – but in the social-media age, that is not an option. The fact that Hayward, a geologist by training, does not fall into the self-aggrandising category has not protected him from becoming the most vilified business figure on the planet. Even the most self-effacing chief executive cannot shelter behind notions of collective responsibility in a disaster.

Many find it hard to sympathise with Hayward, especially after gaffes such as saying he would like to have his life back. Similarly, few will shed tears over the blame poured on errant bank bosses. But according to Professor Julie Froud of Manchester Business School, this personal approach blinds us to deeper issues: "President Obama is coming down very hard on Tony Hayward when he should also be looking at the whole issue of our energy use, which is of course much harder to address," she says. "It is the same with the Treasury Select Committee hearings with the bankers, or the hearings in the US. It is justified to hold individuals to account, but it doesn't address the deeper problems in banking. The reality is that, in large organisations, success or failure just does not hang on any one individual."

One FTSE 100 chief executive believes that there is no shirking individual responsibility: "Leadership is emotional. It is about winning hearts and minds to a common purpose. It is not just about one person, but it starts with one person."