Narcissism Emerges as a Consistent Driver of RTO Resistance Among CEOs
Leaders with higher levels of narcissism were more likely to push back against remote and hybrid work, and the pattern held across three separate studies. The finding comes from a paper published in the July issue of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, where researchers examined whether a personality trait often associated with confidence, boldness, and self-importance also shaped attitudes toward return-to-office mandates.
The work focused on narcissism as an everyday trait that varies across people, not as a psychiatric diagnosis. That distinction matters because the study is not describing clinical disorder or workplace pathology in a diagnostic sense. It is instead examining how a personality style can affect leadership decisions at scale, especially when executives are asked to weigh control, visibility, and influence against employee flexibility.
A single sentence captures the core result: the more narcissistic the leader, the more resistant the leader tended to be to remote work.
Three Studies, One Directional Pattern
Adam Grant, PhD, a management professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, joined doctoral candidates Marissa Shandell and Courtney Elliott on the paper. Their analysis combined an archival review of 259 Fortune 500 CEOs, a preregistered three-wave survey of 359 U.S. leaders conducted in 2023, and a preregistered experiment involving 546 U.S. leaders conducted in 2025.
Across all three designs, the association pointed in the same direction. In the CEO analysis, narcissism was inferred from public-facing indicators rather than a self-report scale. Those indicators included the prominence of the CEO’s photo in the annual report, the size of the CEO’s signature, and the CEO’s pay relative to the second-highest-paid executive. Leaders who scored higher on these measures made stronger public statements opposing remote work during the early pandemic window, from March 2020 through May 2021, and they offered a broader mix of reasons for doing so.
The survey study sharpened the mechanism. Resistance to remote work tracked more closely with leaders’ desire for power and status than with a simple lack of trust in employees. Even after accounting for other personality traits, the link remained intact. In practical terms, the data suggest that remote work may threaten some leaders not because they believe employees will fail, but because decentralization dilutes the visible control and hierarchy that power-oriented personalities tend to protect.
Power Desire Appeared Stronger Than Distrust of Employees
In the experiment, one group of leaders read a short passage describing narcissistic CEOs as bold and successful. That exposure increased resistance to remote work, and the effect moved through a desire for power. Status played a supporting role in the survey and, in exploratory analysis, in the CEO study, but it did not carry the same weight in the experiment.
The mechanism is easy to see once the workplace is viewed through a status lens. Remote and hybrid work can flatten the physical cues of authority: fewer hallway encounters, fewer visible displays of presence, and less opportunity for leaders to project dominance through proximity. For a leader whose psychology is wired toward control and recognition, that reduction in visibility may feel like a loss, even when productivity is unaffected.
Boards and executive teams may recognize the policy debate as a governance issue, but the study places personality squarely in the room. Power motivation, rather than pure operational skepticism, emerged as the more consistent explanation.
Industry Setting Shaped the Explanation More Than the Main Association
Industry context modified how the findings were interpreted, though not whether the core relationship existed. Higher-narcissism CEOs resisted remote work regardless of whether their industry depended on frontline workers, including healthcare. Still, the board-related power and status measures explained that resistance only in sectors that did not depend on frontline staff.
The healthcare signal was especially notable. In the single-industry analysis, healthcare CEOs were somewhat more likely to resist remote work, while technology CEOs were less likely. Those differences fit the operational realities of the sectors: healthcare organizations rely heavily on in-person clinical and operational workflows, while technology companies are often better positioned to normalize distributed work. Yet the study did not reduce the finding to operational necessity alone. Even in industries where remote work is less feasible, personality still appeared to shape how strongly leaders argued against it.
A policy preference can be practical and still be filtered through ego.
What the Study Did Not Measure Matters for Interpretation
The research stops short of showing which organizations actually adopted remote-work policies. It measured public statements and survey responses, not formal workplace rules. CEOs may also have had their comments shaped, edited, or even drafted by colleagues, which means public messaging may not fully reflect private beliefs. The study also relied on proxies for power and status in the CEO analysis, including whether the CEO chaired the board and how many outside board seats the CEO held.
Timing also matters. The CEO data came from the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, when office policy carried an urgency and symbolism that may not generalize cleanly to later periods. Remote work was not just a staffing arrangement then; it became a cultural marker, a management identity test, and, for many executives, a public sign of who controlled the work environment.
The experiment included another cautionary detail. A manipulation check meant to confirm that the prompt truly increased narcissism did not show a significant effect in the main study, though a separate validation study did. That leaves the mechanistic interpretation useful but not closed. The finding is strong enough to warrant attention, but not so airtight that it can be detached from context, measurement, or timing.
Why the Finding Resonates Beyond Workplace Policy
For hospitals, health systems, and other complex organizations, the implications reach beyond where employees sit. Leadership style influences communication, trust, and the degree to which teams feel heard when policies are imposed from above. A leader driven by power and status may be more inclined to treat return-to-office rules as a symbol of authority rather than a flexible operational choice.
That framing can shape morale long before it touches productivity metrics. In organizations where frontline workers already spend their days in person, the executive debate over remote work may seem abstract. Yet the study suggests the debate is often emotionally charged at the top precisely because it intersects with control, hierarchy, and public image.
The paper does not claim that narcissism explains every RTO mandate, and it does not suggest that all opposition to remote work is self-serving. It does show, with unusual consistency across archival, survey, and experimental methods, that higher levels of narcissism were tied to stronger resistance to remote and hybrid work. The remaining question is not whether personality matters at the executive level; it is how often organizations confuse a leader’s need for control with a business necessity.