Most of us have worked for a boss who seemed a little too in love with the sound of their own voice. Some of these leaders are magnetic and inspiring, the kind who make you feel energized about the next big project. Others are prickly and competitive, leaving you drained by the end of the day. So when researchers describe narcissistic leaders as a “double-edged sword,” which edge actually touches the people who report to them?
A study published in the British Journal of Management set out to answer that question by breaking narcissism into its component parts and asking how each one relates to how employees feel about their jobs.
Splitting narcissism into pieces
Iris K. Gauglitz of NEOMA Business School in Reims, France, working with colleagues at the University of Bamberg in Germany, started from a problem in the existing research. Earlier studies on narcissistic bosses produced mixed results. Some found that these leaders harmed employee well-being, while others found no clear effect. Part of the issue, the authors suggest, is that “narcissism” has been treated as a single trait when it is anything but.
Psychologists generally recognize two broad types. Grandiose narcissism is the loud, confident version most people picture: charm, dominance, a hunger for admiration. Vulnerable narcissism is quieter and more defensive, marked by shyness, social withdrawal, and sensitivity to criticism. Both share a sense of entitlement and self-importance, but they show up very differently in daily life.
The researchers went further, splitting each type into two dimensions. For grandiose narcissism, they distinguished admiration (the charming, self-promoting side) from rivalry (the hostile, status-defending side). For vulnerable narcissism, they separated isolation (social withdrawal and inhibition) from enmity (passive-aggressive resentment and a tendency to feel attacked). That gives four distinct flavors of narcissistic leadership to examine.
The resource tug-of-war
To make sense of how these traits might affect employees, the authors leaned on a framework called conservation of resources theory. The basic idea is that people try to protect and build up valued “resources,” which can mean anything from time and energy to trust, support, and recognition. Stress sets in when those resources are threatened or drained.
Leaders sit in a powerful position here. They can hand out resources by offering guidance, encouragement, and status, or they can deplete them through hostility, neglect, or constant demands for attention. The researchers reasoned that each narcissism dimension might tip this balance in a different direction. A charming, admiration-seeking boss might inspire and energize, while a combative, rivalry-driven one might leave staff exhausted from walking on eggshells.
They focused on two outcomes that occupational health researchers study closely. Work engagement describes a positive, energetic state of being absorbed and dedicated to one’s job. Emotional exhaustion describes the depleted, burned-out feeling that comes from chronic stress. The team wanted to know how each type of perceived narcissism related to these two states.
One design choice matters here. Rather than asking leaders to rate their own narcissism, the study measured how employees perceived their bosses. The authors argue that a leader’s reputation, meaning how others see them, tends to predict employee reactions better than the leader’s own self-image.
How the study worked
The team recruited 442 working adults in Germany through an online panel provider. Participants had to be employed at least 10 hours a week and to have worked with their current leader for at least three months. On average, they had been with their boss for more than five years, though the range stretched from a few months to several decades.
The study used two surveys spaced four weeks apart. In the first, employees rated their leader’s narcissism across the four dimensions using adapted versions of established questionnaires. In the second, they reported their own work engagement and emotional exhaustion. Separating the measurements in time is meant to reduce the bias that can creep in when people answer everything at once. The researchers also registered their predictions in advance, a step that commits a team to its hypotheses before seeing the data.
What the analysis revealed
The results painted a more textured picture than a simple “good boss, bad boss” split.
As expected, employees who saw their leader as high in admiration tended to report higher work engagement. Those who saw their leader as high in rivalry tended to report lower engagement. These two findings matched the team’s predictions and fit the broader idea that charm provides energy while hostility drains it.
The surprise came with isolation. The researchers had predicted that a withdrawn, socially distant leader would leave employees feeling unsupported and less engaged. Instead, perceived leader isolation was linked to higher engagement. The authors interpret this cautiously, suggesting that a hands-off boss may give employees more autonomy and room to make their own decisions, and that the benefit of that freedom may outweigh the downside of missing guidance.
The fourth dimension, enmity, showed no significant link to engagement at all. The authors propose that the passive-aggressive, behind-the-scenes nature of enmity may simply be harder for employees to notice than the open hostility of rivalry, so it may not register strongly in day-to-day work life.
Perhaps the biggest null result involved exhaustion. None of the four narcissism dimensions showed a significant relationship with employee emotional exhaustion. The researchers offer a possible explanation rooted in their theory. Engagement is a dynamic, in-the-moment state that may respond quickly to a leader’s behavior, while exhaustion builds up slowly from many sources over time. A boss’s personality may be just one ingredient in that larger accumulation. They also note that their exhaustion measure was brief, using only three items, which may not have captured the full experience.
The role of time
The team also explored whether the length of the working relationship changed any of these patterns. Here they found one effect. The negative link between perceived rivalry and engagement grew stronger the longer an employee had worked with their leader. The authors suggest that the frictions of a combative boss may pile up over years, with conflicts and resource losses accumulating. They caution, though, that this effect was small and that its statistical estimate sat close to zero, so it should be read carefully.
A separate check produced another contrast. When the researchers combined the dimensions into broad measures of grandiose and vulnerable narcissism, neither broad category predicted engagement, but the broad vulnerable measure was linked to higher exhaustion. The authors read this as a sign that matching the level of detail to the outcome matters, and that lumping all narcissism together can hide the distinct effects of its parts.
What it means for workplaces
The authors are direct about a limit on any practical advice. Because the study is correlational, it cannot establish what causes what. It remains possible, they note, that disengaged employees come to view their leaders as more narcissistic, rather than the leadership shaping the engagement. That reverse path is a genuine alternative the data cannot rule out.
With that caveat in mind, the team offers a few directions for organizations. One is to screen for rivalry-type traits during hiring and promotion, while actively selecting for qualities like empathy that tend not to accompany rivalry. Another is leadership training that helps managers see how their behavior either supplies or drains their team’s resources. The authors also suggest that if low engagement is in fact coloring how employees see their bosses, then addressing the root causes of disengagement directly, through job design or wellness efforts, could improve both employee well-being and the leader-follower relationship.
The larger takeaway, the researchers argue, is that “narcissistic boss” is too blunt a label. The same broad trait can pull employee engagement in opposite directions depending on which specific tendency is in play, and a withdrawn leader may not be the villain that intuition suggests.
