Nobody loves TO like TO loves TO (Sally Jenkins, WaPo)

[northzax]

Nobody Loves T.O. Like T.O. Loves T.O.
By Sally Jenkins

Thursday, November 10, 2005; Page E01

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.

...

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, and a former CEO who is professor of organizational behavior at Case Western Reserve University. 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....

READ THE REST at the Washington Post it is a great explanation, from a team perspective, of what happened.