When companies started calling employees back to the office after the pandemic, the reasoning offered was usually about productivity, collaboration, or company culture. But watching the mandates roll out, some workers noticed something odd: the fiercest advocates for in-person work often seemed less concerned with performance metrics than with something harder to name. A hunger for the room. A desire to be watched.
A new paper published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes puts empirical weight behind that intuition. Across three studies of CEOs and lower-level managers, the researchers found that narcissistic leaders are notably more resistant to remote work than their peers, and that this resistance is linked to their appetite for power and status over employees.
The question behind the research
Prior explanations for why leaders resist remote work have generally focused on practical constraints: technology gaps, financial pressures, industries that require physical presence, or a manager’s own lack of experience with virtual tools. What has received less attention is the role of leader personality, which tends to matter more when leaders have discretion over decisions.
Marissa Shandell and her colleagues Courtney Elliott and Adam Grant, all at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, wanted to know whether one specific trait might help explain the divide. They focused on grandiose narcissism, which they describe as a tendency toward an inflated ego and a view of oneself as special and superior. It exists on a continuum in the general population and is common among people who rise to leadership positions.
The researchers reasoned that in-person work offers something remote work cannot: a rich communication environment where a leader can command attention, read admiration in facial expressions, exert control through physical presence, and receive immediate feedback. Remote work, by contrast, flattens the visual hierarchy (everyone becomes a square on a screen), delays responses, and gives employees more autonomy over when and how to engage. For someone whose sense of self is fed by external validation and dominance, the researchers hypothesized, that shift would feel like a threat.
Studying Fortune 500 CEOs
The first study looked at 259 CEOs from Fortune 500 companies during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. To gauge narcissism without asking the CEOs directly, the researchers used four indirect measures drawn from prior research: how prominently the CEO’s photo appeared in their company’s annual report, the size of their signature, and how much they were paid in cash and non-cash compensation compared with the second-highest-paid executive at the firm. These are behavioral signals of a tendency to portray oneself as special and to feel entitled to outsize rewards.
To measure remote work resistance, two independent coders read publicly available articles containing each CEO’s stated position on remote and hybrid work. They rated the intensity of resistance on a seven-point scale and separately counted how many distinct objections (productivity, collaboration, innovation, learning, culture, well-being) each CEO raised.
The pattern was consistent: CEOs who scored higher on the narcissism index expressed more intense resistance to remote work and raised a wider range of complaints about it. The relationship held after accounting for company size, revenue, market capitalization, industry, and whether the firm depended on frontline workers.
The researchers also explored two possible reasons why. As a proxy for power motivation, they noted whether the CEO also served as chairman of their own board. As a proxy for status motivation, they counted the number of prestigious external board seats (at Fortune 500 companies, universities, and nonprofits) each CEO held. Narcissistic CEOs were more likely to hold both types of positions, and those positions in turn were associated with greater resistance to remote work, but only in industries not dependent on frontline workers, where leaders had real discretion over policy.
Extending the findings to everyday leaders
CEOs are an unusual group, and pandemic conditions were an unusual moment. To see whether the pattern held more broadly, the researchers conducted a preregistered three-wave survey of 359 U.S. leaders across various industries and levels of seniority in 2023. Participants completed measures of narcissism, then power and status motivations a week later, then remote work resistance a week after that.
The relationship persisted. Leaders scoring higher on narcissism reported stronger resistance to remote work, and this connection ran through their desires for power and status over employees. That is, more narcissistic leaders reported wanting more control and authority over their teams and more admiration from them, and those motivations were linked to a stronger preference for in-person work.
The finding held even after controlling for a long list of alternative explanations: trust in employees, general trust propensity, all five major personality traits (including extraversion, which overlaps with narcissism), and the other two “Dark Triad” traits of Machiavellianism and psychopathy. Notably, low trust in employees did not explain the pattern the way some prior research had suggested it might.
An experimental test
The third study, also preregistered, tested causality more directly. The researchers recruited 546 current leaders and randomly assigned half to read a short passage designed to activate a narcissistic mindset. It highlighted the boldness and self-confidence of famously narcissistic business leaders, including a quote from Oracle’s Larry Ellison: “It’s not enough that we win; all others must lose.” The other half of participants read no such passage.
Leaders in the narcissism condition subsequently expressed more resistance to remote work than those in the control group, and this difference ran through a heightened desire to exercise power over their teams. Status motivation did not shift significantly in this experiment, though it was consistently linked to resistance in the survey data. The authors interpret the pattern as evidence that the power motivation piece is the more robust driver, while the status piece may depend on how it is measured or activated.
What the researchers argue this means
The authors argue that their findings complicate the standard story about why leaders push back against flexible work. Public justifications tend to focus on organizational goals like productivity and culture. But the data suggest that at least some of the resistance is rooted in more personal concerns about maintaining authority and admiration, which in-person settings supply more readily than video calls.
The researchers also note an apparent contradiction with earlier work on narcissism and technology. Prior studies have found that narcissists gravitate toward social media platforms, where they can curate images and reach large audiences. But the authors interpret their results as showing that in positions of authority, narcissists prefer the in-person setting, where they can not just be seen but also exert control. Virtual platforms may extend a narcissist’s reach outside work while constraining it inside the office.
There are limits worth noting. The CEO study relies on public statements, which may not perfectly reflect private views or actual company policies. The narcissism measures, while validated in prior research, are indirect proxies. And the mediating role of status motivation was inconsistent across studies. The authors themselves flag that future research should examine actual remote work policies rather than stated preferences.
For employees and organizations
The researchers offer a few practical suggestions. For organizations designing remote work policies, they suggest that committees drawing up such rules include a mix of perspectives, to limit the influence of any single leader’s personal preferences. For employees hoping to preserve flexibility, they suggest that direct confrontation may backfire with narcissistic bosses. Consulting a leader for advice on how hybrid arrangements might work, rather than demanding them, may reduce the sense of threat that fuels resistance in the first place.
