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.
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.
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).
Good managers are there to clear obstacles for good workers to do their best work. Unfortunately, not all workers are on board/motivated enough to do their best. It's less of an issue in software, because essentially everyone is well-compensated and comfortable.
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.
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"
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.
> there is nothing wrong with those emotional ties
This is a US centric viewpoint, and also a non-leadership viewpoint.
It may not be wrong to experience emotional attachment to an employer, but it's unwise in my opinion if it can all be gone instantly.
Because companies exist to make money, and they will let you go if they can't afford you, want to avoid serious trouble, or think they'll make more money doing something else, with little or no notice. They'll lay off thousands at the drop of an email. You might get some severance, and that takes care of you for a while, but it's better if you take it into your own hands and jump ship every few years. Ultimately you have to be responsible for yourself and your own well-being.
> 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
This sentence right here makes me think you don't need to work for survival, and that's not the position the majority of people on the planet are in. I'd love to look at my job as something that merely increases my bank balance and not something essential to keep me insured, housed and fed.
Since I live in a nation that offers a tapestry of entitlements and safety nets for the indigent, and I've tapped into those resources, finding them available in my time of greatest need, I worry far less now about losing all my income, because if it drops near-enough to zero, then that clears the way for assistance for my basic needs, especially food, medical care, shelter, and utilities.
You may hear tell of the "donut hole" or "welfare trap" or similar terms. Being among the working poor is a zero-sum game. I get gov't assistance for vocational rehab and supported employment. I secure employment, I earn money in legitimate paychecks, it's siphoned away for taxes and living expenses, I can't build a savings; my job ends, and I'm "back on the dole". The cycle repeats.
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.
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.
21 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 41.7 ms ] threadFortune 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
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.
- 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).
The ego rages for energy — to run on stress hormones.
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"
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.
This is a US centric viewpoint, and also a non-leadership viewpoint.
It may not be wrong to experience emotional attachment to an employer, but it's unwise in my opinion if it can all be gone instantly.
Because companies exist to make money, and they will let you go if they can't afford you, want to avoid serious trouble, or think they'll make more money doing something else, with little or no notice. They'll lay off thousands at the drop of an email. You might get some severance, and that takes care of you for a while, but it's better if you take it into your own hands and jump ship every few years. Ultimately you have to be responsible for yourself and your own well-being.
> 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
This sentence right here makes me think you don't need to work for survival, and that's not the position the majority of people on the planet are in. I'd love to look at my job as something that merely increases my bank balance and not something essential to keep me insured, housed and fed.
You may hear tell of the "donut hole" or "welfare trap" or similar terms. Being among the working poor is a zero-sum game. I get gov't assistance for vocational rehab and supported employment. I secure employment, I earn money in legitimate paychecks, it's siphoned away for taxes and living expenses, I can't build a savings; my job ends, and I'm "back on the dole". The cycle repeats.
- 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.
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.