Leaders who score higher on narcissism are more likely to resist remote and hybrid work, according to a study published in the July issue of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
The paper was written by Adam Grant, PhD, a management professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and doctoral candidates Marissa Shandell and Courtney Elliott. They ran three studies: an archival analysis of 259 Fortune 500 CEOs; a preregistered, three-wave survey of 359 U.S. leaders conducted in 2023; and a preregistered experiment with 546 U.S. leaders conducted in 2025.
The researchers said they studied narcissism as an everyday personality trait that people exhibit in varying degrees, not as a clinical disorder. They also noted that prior research has found traits linked to narcissism, such as confidence and boldness, can help leaders when they come in moderate doses or alongside humility.
Here are five things to know from the study:
1. Narcissism was linked to remote work resistance in all three studies. In the CEO analysis, researchers estimated narcissism from public indicators. These included how prominent the CEO’s photo was in the annual report, the size of the CEO’s signature, and the CEO’s pay compared with the second-highest-paid executive. CEOs who scored higher on these measures made public statements opposing remote work more strongly, and gave a wider range of reasons, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, from March 2020 to May 2021. In the survey, researchers tied that resistance to leaders’ desire for power and status rather than a lack of trust in employees, and the link held after controlling for other personality traits.
2. Power motivation was the more consistent explanation. In the experiment, one group of leaders read a short passage presenting narcissistic CEOs as bold and successful. That group expressed more resistance to remote work, and the effect ran through a desire for power. A desire for status helped explain resistance in the survey and, in exploratory analysis, the CEO study, but not in the experiment.
3. Industry context mattered for the explanation, though not for the core finding. Higher-narcissism CEOs resisted remote work whether or not their industry relied on frontline workers, a group that included healthcare. But the board-related power and status measures helped explain that resistance only in industries that did not depend on frontline staff. Looking at single industries, healthcare CEOs were somewhat more likely to resist remote work and technology CEOs were less likely.
4. The authors said the finding should not be read in reverse: Resisting remote work does not make a leader narcissistic, but leaders higher in the trait were the most likely to resist, according to an Oct. 26 article from the university’s Knowledge at Wharton.
5. The study noted several limitations in its findings. It measured public statements and survey responses, not the remote work policies organizations actually adopted. CEOs’ public comments may not match their private views, and colleagues may have shaped or written them. The power and status measures in the CEO analysis were proxies: whether the CEO also chaired the board, and how many outside board seats the CEO held. The CEO data also came from early in the pandemic, and the authors highlighted the importance of studying whether the finding holds outside that period. In the main experiment, a check on whether the prompt actually raised narcissism showed no significant effect. The authors then ran a separate validation study, where it did.
