This study is extremely weak. The "unobtrusive measures" they use as proxies for narcissism are poorly correlated. It's also a bad sign they need to devote such substantial portions of the paper trying to defend Study 1's questionable proxy measures.
There are obvious confounding variable and alternate explanations for these factors starting with the fact relative compensation metrics vary by industry norms, sector dynamics, and company maturity. This feels like a paper where they went looking for a correlation they hoped to find and then did a lot of work to rationalize weak correlations and coax their preferred narrative past peer review.
While the conclusion is sure to find a sympathetic audience among employees psycho-analyzing the personality flaws of "the boss" around the water-cooler, the paper fails to adequately support its conclusions.
Even if one were to grant the conclusion — leaders resist remote work to preserve their "power and status" — to what extent is the magnitude and success of a company (or for that matter, any serious enterprise) a direct function of its leader's ability to:
- Exercise authority / power
- Maintain status within the hierarchy
As in - who wants to work for a leader who is neither powerful nor high-status within their own company? Who consciously chooses a leader who is neither effective in getting people to do the right things, nor effective in commanding a (somewhat faith-based) trust in their long-term vision?
The study feels extremely leading in its idea of what a "good" leader would look like (presumably "hands off," leaves everyone alone such that good outcomes simple "emerge", etc) -- while treating this bent as obvious truth.
I say this as someone who spent the last 6 years straight working remotely (also having been successful in contributing impact).
> who wants to work for a leader who is neither powerful nor high-status within their own company?
Me. In my limited experience, the more leaders are involved, the less likely the project is to be successful. The ideal situation is having leadership that is able to set a decent strategy, and then get out of the way of their subordinates and let them execute. Bad leadership micromanages and inserts themselves in the way of execution.
The status and “power” involved in setting strategy isn’t nearly as significant as the amount involved in micromanagement.
There are other reasons that an employee may comply with a leader's instructions than some highly subjective and deeply irrational notion of social status. For example, they might comply because they're paid to, or because they want company to succeed (for stocks, or for other reasons). Some performance of authority isn't a perquisite for humans choosing to organize.
Sure, but there are longer shots than others, where money alone won't make the difference and when conviction in mission is directly related to conviction in founders/leaders.
"subjective and deeply irrational" aren't the exception for how humans organize
Here’s a short list why remote work was attacked in a coordinated way:
- government: the government found that remote workers aren’t staying in expensive urban areas, it means less taxes through property taxes and other forms of taxes as well. It also means they have to build infrastructure in other areas than few hotspots in the country.
- banks: banks gave loans to landlords, primarily commercial and residential, landlords can’t pay it back because no one is renting the inflated prices of urban areas.
- landlords: obviously, their income is your hardwork for residential, or investors’ money/cut of your revenue for commercial. Also the government too, like how it’s in Canada, housing market is one of the categories that make the economy, you hit that, you hit the economy.
- managers/CEOs: as the article goes in details, it’s pure power dynamics, the lust to feel in charge can’t be satisfied remotely, and the ones who tried it either failed or looked like a total freaks (one manager I remember requested to have camera on while working from home), the manager needs to feel the status of walking around the horrible open office style and checking on this, criticizing that, all while other employees are hearing this big boss in the room!
Who was winning in remote work? The employees, their families, their kids, their wellbeing, their wallets, even cars went cheap because people don’t need to commute 2hrs everyday. Sure, remote work isn’t for everyone, but it should be always available as an option for who can.
It's evident that human tribes are organized to be led by narcissists.
It's easy to organize a tribe around neurodivergence and personality disorders if we think about them as genetic roles.
Typical people are highly social and efficient. They depend heavily on hierrarchy and social coherence to navigate the world and can take on any task as general workers.
Narcissistic people are a subtype of typicals who are the leaders of the tribe, they play the hierarchy games the best to raise to the top.
Adhd people are the explorers of the world, they are social but can leave the group to explore, they bring entropy to the system.
Autistic people are the engineers of society, the hierrarchy thinking is replaced by a systemizer view of the world. No scientific discovery happens without a high functioning autistic quietly working in the background. Their brain rewards them for learning and progress, not social games.
Dyslexic people are the other engineers of the tribe, they can live within hierarchy and have a view of the entire picture, so they can efficiently organize and build structures like housing.
The list goes on. It's all on purpose but the modern humans forgot it all, or maybe we never really knew our roles in the world, it all just "happens"
What I'm feeling is that this narcissistic personality might actually be a signal that society rewards. I saw a news report recently saying that narcissistic traits are often found in successful CEOs.
In my view, maybe society is designed in a way that makes it hard for people without narcissism to succeed. It's like bad money driving out good.
Most successful VC leaders in the US are generally considered to have narcissistic traits. Why is that? VCs are inherently dealing with uncertainty in their investments. Grandiose delusions and absolute conviction get packaged as 'vision' and 'confidence.' Elon Musk's space data center project might look physically implausible, but some famous VCs see it as vision.
Narcissistic leadership is an extreme high-risk, high-return play. They ignore others' advice and bet on their own intuition. If they succeed, it's called innovation (Tesla, Apple). If they fail, it becomes WeWork. We only ever see the narcissists who won, but on the flip side, that's exactly what society rewards as a signal.
Society can't measure actual ability directly. So it looks for proxy signals. But vision, grandiosity, self-promotion, and actual performance are hard to distinguish. In a mass market, someone who speaks loudly gets famous before someone who quietly does good work.
Narcissism is advantageous in this selection stage. People say the preliminaries don't matter, only the finals do. But without the preliminaries, there's no finals, and in the preliminaries, narcissism is almost always advantageous.
Summarizing the papers I've read, narcissistic leaders tend to resist pushback because face-to-face environments where their power and status can be checked are reduced over time. And our society has built a system that rewards exactly that.
So rationally, we all know that this is wrong, that we should respect others, and that we should cut down our own egos. But the capitalist system seems to run in the exact opposite direction.
At scale, a clear identity is needed to get people to give you what it takes to pay the bills. An identity that is continuously refined becomes clearer. The act of refinement of the identity may then create an attachment to the identity, like an IKEA effect. Any protections of the identity also serve to make the identity clearer to others.
All of my jobs until the last one were in-person, in-office, and toward the end of my schooling, some college courses were 100% remote/online, so I've developed a lot of thoughts.
At this point I would oppose remote jobs and opt for the in-person ones. Though my remote job was fantastic in terms of flexibility and the comfort of my own home, much was lacking.
It is far, far easier to collaborate with humans and rally around supervisors and leadership who are visible and tangible, and interact as humans not mediated. It was fine, in my silo, doing my solitary worker-bee work, and turning out productive results every day, but honestly it stopped feeling like "a job" or "work" but just one of those things I was doing online that happened to increase my bank balance. It wasn't functionally different from Wikipedia editing!
I think that in-person work fosters loyalty, it forms us in the corporate culture, and we grow fond of a good employer inside their walls and using their resources, rather than cleaning our own damn bathroom and the "break room" is our personal fridge, where we pay the electric bill. It is not wrong for subordinates to experience emotional attachment and devotion to our managers, supervisors, and executives, and within the bounds of corporate professionalism, there is nothing wrong with those emotional ties. Even if I must lament the demise of same-sex exclusive spaces and the increase in gender-based tensions or imbalances among office workers.
Nevermind the practical and financial WFH disadvantages but I don't call leaders "narcissistic" just because they enjoy being human and socialized.
At this point its not even about practical and financial "disadvantages" for me but literal affordability. I'd gladly go to the office every day, if they weren't all hell bent on setting up downtown while having to live >1h15 out of town on a good day to be able to think about affording anything.
I get the attempt to make these arguments, but on the face and common sense of it, remote work promotes narcissistic behavior far more than some CEO does. The CEO wants the company to succeed.
My speculation and experience at what's going on between the cracks since we're just talking:
-Leadership skills and leadership positions are woefully not 1:1 (lot of bad leaders out there)
-Leaders have to work a bit harder to make sure hybrid works well, whereas all onsite or all remote tend to naturally keep things more in sync with "one way to do things", this goes poorly with empty suits in leadership roles
-Enough people want better work-life that they dig in and treat remote work as birthright, this can drive anecdotes you see in the CEO-level rags when they clash with meh or worse leaders
-Employee perks like remote work don't always = ROI or better company outcomes, and vice versa
Sometimes they are just too addicted to gossip by the water cooler. For all the information that flies in and out of different teams, departments and organisations, water cooler is probably the best place to learn enough to position yourself in the company. A narcissistic boss would be obsessed with that, naturally, and consider others who don't as outliers.
I will never work somewhere again where I can't work remote.
This study is extremely weak. The "unobtrusive measures" they use as proxies for narcissism are poorly correlated. It's also a bad sign they need to devote such substantial portions of the paper trying to defend Study 1's questionable proxy measures.
There are obvious confounding variable and alternate explanations for these factors starting with the fact relative compensation metrics vary by industry norms, sector dynamics, and company maturity. This feels like a paper where they went looking for a correlation they hoped to find and then did a lot of work to rationalize weak correlations and coax their preferred narrative past peer review.
While the conclusion is sure to find a sympathetic audience among employees psycho-analyzing the personality flaws of "the boss" around the water-cooler, the paper fails to adequately support its conclusions.
Even if one were to grant the conclusion — leaders resist remote work to preserve their "power and status" — to what extent is the magnitude and success of a company (or for that matter, any serious enterprise) a direct function of its leader's ability to:
- Exercise authority / power
- Maintain status within the hierarchy
As in - who wants to work for a leader who is neither powerful nor high-status within their own company? Who consciously chooses a leader who is neither effective in getting people to do the right things, nor effective in commanding a (somewhat faith-based) trust in their long-term vision?
The study feels extremely leading in its idea of what a "good" leader would look like (presumably "hands off," leaves everyone alone such that good outcomes simple "emerge", etc) -- while treating this bent as obvious truth.
I say this as someone who spent the last 6 years straight working remotely (also having been successful in contributing impact).
> who wants to work for a leader who is neither powerful nor high-status within their own company?
Me. In my limited experience, the more leaders are involved, the less likely the project is to be successful. The ideal situation is having leadership that is able to set a decent strategy, and then get out of the way of their subordinates and let them execute. Bad leadership micromanages and inserts themselves in the way of execution.
The status and “power” involved in setting strategy isn’t nearly as significant as the amount involved in micromanagement.
There are other reasons that an employee may comply with a leader's instructions than some highly subjective and deeply irrational notion of social status. For example, they might comply because they're paid to, or because they want company to succeed (for stocks, or for other reasons). Some performance of authority isn't a perquisite for humans choosing to organize.
Sure, but there are longer shots than others, where money alone won't make the difference and when conviction in mission is directly related to conviction in founders/leaders.
"subjective and deeply irrational" aren't the exception for how humans organize
It's not a zero sum game. You can preserver power and status without being a narcissist.
Certainly you can - but this study appears to use motivations around power and status as its heuristic for narcissism!
Here’s a short list why remote work was attacked in a coordinated way:
- government: the government found that remote workers aren’t staying in expensive urban areas, it means less taxes through property taxes and other forms of taxes as well. It also means they have to build infrastructure in other areas than few hotspots in the country.
- banks: banks gave loans to landlords, primarily commercial and residential, landlords can’t pay it back because no one is renting the inflated prices of urban areas.
- landlords: obviously, their income is your hardwork for residential, or investors’ money/cut of your revenue for commercial. Also the government too, like how it’s in Canada, housing market is one of the categories that make the economy, you hit that, you hit the economy.
- managers/CEOs: as the article goes in details, it’s pure power dynamics, the lust to feel in charge can’t be satisfied remotely, and the ones who tried it either failed or looked like a total freaks (one manager I remember requested to have camera on while working from home), the manager needs to feel the status of walking around the horrible open office style and checking on this, criticizing that, all while other employees are hearing this big boss in the room!
Who was winning in remote work? The employees, their families, their kids, their wellbeing, their wallets, even cars went cheap because people don’t need to commute 2hrs everyday. Sure, remote work isn’t for everyone, but it should be always available as an option for who can.
Doesn't really need more words to explain it than "do what I say".
It's evident that human tribes are organized to be led by narcissists.
It's easy to organize a tribe around neurodivergence and personality disorders if we think about them as genetic roles.
Typical people are highly social and efficient. They depend heavily on hierrarchy and social coherence to navigate the world and can take on any task as general workers.
Narcissistic people are a subtype of typicals who are the leaders of the tribe, they play the hierarchy games the best to raise to the top.
Adhd people are the explorers of the world, they are social but can leave the group to explore, they bring entropy to the system.
Autistic people are the engineers of society, the hierrarchy thinking is replaced by a systemizer view of the world. No scientific discovery happens without a high functioning autistic quietly working in the background. Their brain rewards them for learning and progress, not social games.
Dyslexic people are the other engineers of the tribe, they can live within hierarchy and have a view of the entire picture, so they can efficiently organize and build structures like housing.
The list goes on. It's all on purpose but the modern humans forgot it all, or maybe we never really knew our roles in the world, it all just "happens"
https://complementarycognition.co.uk/
I'm happy it's a thing and not just my autistic ramblings :)
incredibly cliché and essentialist view of the world, reads like a bad pseudoscientific self help book from the 90's
Without other people in the room, or at least on a video call, they have no audience to perform for, so they'd barely move.
The ego rages for energy — to run on stress hormones.
Might the Evil Overlord List be due for an update?
Related:
Fortune 500 bosses demanding staff RTO share 1 trait: Narcissism, research finds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48682333 - June 2026
The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day: Narcissism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48639459 - June 2026
What I'm feeling is that this narcissistic personality might actually be a signal that society rewards. I saw a news report recently saying that narcissistic traits are often found in successful CEOs.
In my view, maybe society is designed in a way that makes it hard for people without narcissism to succeed. It's like bad money driving out good.
Most successful VC leaders in the US are generally considered to have narcissistic traits. Why is that? VCs are inherently dealing with uncertainty in their investments. Grandiose delusions and absolute conviction get packaged as 'vision' and 'confidence.' Elon Musk's space data center project might look physically implausible, but some famous VCs see it as vision.
Narcissistic leadership is an extreme high-risk, high-return play. They ignore others' advice and bet on their own intuition. If they succeed, it's called innovation (Tesla, Apple). If they fail, it becomes WeWork. We only ever see the narcissists who won, but on the flip side, that's exactly what society rewards as a signal.
Society can't measure actual ability directly. So it looks for proxy signals. But vision, grandiosity, self-promotion, and actual performance are hard to distinguish. In a mass market, someone who speaks loudly gets famous before someone who quietly does good work.
Narcissism is advantageous in this selection stage. People say the preliminaries don't matter, only the finals do. But without the preliminaries, there's no finals, and in the preliminaries, narcissism is almost always advantageous.
Summarizing the papers I've read, narcissistic leaders tend to resist pushback because face-to-face environments where their power and status can be checked are reduced over time. And our society has built a system that rewards exactly that.
So rationally, we all know that this is wrong, that we should respect others, and that we should cut down our own egos. But the capitalist system seems to run in the exact opposite direction.
At scale, a clear identity is needed to get people to give you what it takes to pay the bills. An identity that is continuously refined becomes clearer. The act of refinement of the identity may then create an attachment to the identity, like an IKEA effect. Any protections of the identity also serve to make the identity clearer to others.
It feels like identity and personal branding. The Western perspective and the Eastern perspective definitely seem different.
All of my jobs until the last one were in-person, in-office, and toward the end of my schooling, some college courses were 100% remote/online, so I've developed a lot of thoughts.
At this point I would oppose remote jobs and opt for the in-person ones. Though my remote job was fantastic in terms of flexibility and the comfort of my own home, much was lacking.
It is far, far easier to collaborate with humans and rally around supervisors and leadership who are visible and tangible, and interact as humans not mediated. It was fine, in my silo, doing my solitary worker-bee work, and turning out productive results every day, but honestly it stopped feeling like "a job" or "work" but just one of those things I was doing online that happened to increase my bank balance. It wasn't functionally different from Wikipedia editing!
I think that in-person work fosters loyalty, it forms us in the corporate culture, and we grow fond of a good employer inside their walls and using their resources, rather than cleaning our own damn bathroom and the "break room" is our personal fridge, where we pay the electric bill. It is not wrong for subordinates to experience emotional attachment and devotion to our managers, supervisors, and executives, and within the bounds of corporate professionalism, there is nothing wrong with those emotional ties. Even if I must lament the demise of same-sex exclusive spaces and the increase in gender-based tensions or imbalances among office workers.
Nevermind the practical and financial WFH disadvantages but I don't call leaders "narcissistic" just because they enjoy being human and socialized.
At this point its not even about practical and financial "disadvantages" for me but literal affordability. I'd gladly go to the office every day, if they weren't all hell bent on setting up downtown while having to live >1h15 out of town on a good day to be able to think about affording anything.
I get the attempt to make these arguments, but on the face and common sense of it, remote work promotes narcissistic behavior far more than some CEO does. The CEO wants the company to succeed.
I wasn't able to find anything to either support or refute what you said.
On one hand, there's a poll that said 58% of respondents admit to ghostwork:
https://www.resume-now.com/job-resources/careers/ghostworkin...
But how many people sit at a desk or office idly to keep up appearances? That's so common its a trope.
Gallup has some interesting polls, they highlight manager engagement as the #1 link to employee engagement:
https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-...
and
https://www.gallup.com/workplace/697904/state-of-the-global-...
Expectations on some remote work remain stable since 2023:
https://www.gallup.com/401384/indicator-hybrid-work.aspx
My speculation and experience at what's going on between the cracks since we're just talking:
-Leadership skills and leadership positions are woefully not 1:1 (lot of bad leaders out there)
-Leaders have to work a bit harder to make sure hybrid works well, whereas all onsite or all remote tend to naturally keep things more in sync with "one way to do things", this goes poorly with empty suits in leadership roles
-Enough people want better work-life that they dig in and treat remote work as birthright, this can drive anecdotes you see in the CEO-level rags when they clash with meh or worse leaders
-Employee perks like remote work don't always = ROI or better company outcomes, and vice versa
Citation needed
found the CEO
Sometimes they are just too addicted to gossip by the water cooler. For all the information that flies in and out of different teams, departments and organisations, water cooler is probably the best place to learn enough to position yourself in the company. A narcissistic boss would be obsessed with that, naturally, and consider others who don't as outliers.