This article expresses my exact feelings on the whole topic (EXCERPTS):
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 ......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."
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.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/09/AR2005110902106.html
