Why Narcissistic Leaders Resist Remote Work — A Reflection from Running a Fully Remote Organization

“Worship me at the office altar.” A paper with a provocative title just ran in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. It’s Worship me at the office altar: Why narcissistic leaders resist remote work, by Marissa S. Shandell, Courtney E. Elliott, and Adam Grant of the Wharton School. The claim is simple, and uncomfortable. The more narcissistic a leader is, the more they resist remote work, and the reason isn’t productivity or culture but the loss of the power and status that being in the room supplies.

I help run a company built on a remote-first premise, and as CTO I look after both the technology and the organization. Whether remote work is a good idea is a question I’ve spent the last several years wrestling with as a participant, not a spectator. So I couldn’t read this paper at arm’s length. It would be easy to use it as ammunition (“leaders who oppose remote work are just self-absorbed”) and feel vindicated, but that’s the least interesting way to read the study. The sharper question is whether the same dynamics operate, in a different form, on those of us pushing remote work too.

One disclaimer first. Some jobs genuinely can’t be done unless you’re physically there. When the physical site itself is the essence of the work, as in healthcare, elder care, manufacturing, logistics, construction, or hospitality, the question of remote versus in-person simply doesn’t apply. I have no intention of belittling the value of that work. If anything, society holds together because there are people keeping those sites running. What I want to address here is the narrower case: where remote work is genuinely an option, and yet a leader still clings to being in person. In fact, the paper found that in industries dependent on frontline workers, the link between narcissism and resistance to remote work didn’t appear at all. Please read this as being about people who have a choice.

This post is an essay that considers what the study found from the seat of someone running a remote organization, one step removed. After confirming what the research actually shows, I work through the question I should turn on myself, how to scrutinize the “for the sake of productivity” explanation, and how remote work also functions as a governance mechanism.

What the Research Established

Let me start with what the paper actually shows. The authors tested the same hypothesis three different ways: that more narcissistic leaders resist remote work more.

Study 1: An archival analysis of 259 Fortune 500 CEOs. Narcissism was estimated from unobtrusive indicators, the size of the CEO’s photo in the annual report, the size of their signature, and their pay relative to other executives. Coding each CEO’s publicly expressed stance on remote work early in the COVID-19 pandemic on a 7-point scale, the study found that more narcissistic CEOs resisted remote work more.
Study 2: A preregistered three-wave survey of 359 current leaders. Narcissism predicted resistance to remote work, and the relationship was mediated by power motivation and status motivation. Crucially, narcissism’s distinct effect survived even after controlling for trust, the Big Five, and the remaining two Dark Triad traits.
Study 3: A preregistered experiment with 546 leaders. Temporarily activating narcissism increased resistance to remote work, but through power motivation rather than status motivation.

Two theories run through all three studies. One is the extended agency model, which treats narcissism as a self-regulatory system aimed at protecting and enhancing self-esteem. The other is media richness theory, which holds that communication media differ in how much information they convey. Put the two together and you can see why narcissists cling to being in person.

One caveat worth stressing: the narcissism this research studies is not a clinical personality disorder but a dimension of normal personality that everyone carries to some degree. It’s a continuum, and in moderate doses it can function as boldness or vision. So this isn’t about labeling some executive as pathological. It’s about a tendency that could apply to anyone, myself included.

Why In-Person Work Feeds the Ego

The heart of the argument is two motives: power and status. The authors carefully distinguish them. Power is the desire to control and direct others. Status is the desire to be admired and validated by others. Narcissists crave both, and the in-person office supplies both efficiently. That’s the skeleton of the argument.

What makes in-person work so potent? In the language of media richness theory, face-to-face is the richest medium. Facial expressions, tone of voice, eye contact, gesture, the timing of a pause, all these cues are exchanged instantly, in the moment. A leader can use these rich channels to be the loudest voice in the room, to draw everyone’s gaze, to elicit deference. The classic form of control the paper cites, managing by wandering around, only works when you’re physically in the same space.

Remote work starves that supply. Reports can turn their cameras off. They can hide their emotions on the far side of a screen. They can defer replies to email and chat. They can set their own schedules. On a video call, the leader is demoted from the big desk in the corner office to a small square on the screen, the same size as everyone else. The paper’s striking point is that these changes are experienced by narcissists as a depletion of “narcissistic supply.” An environment where admiration and deference no longer come back in real time becomes, for them, a place where self-esteem is under constant threat.

So resistance, often voiced in the language of productivity and collaboration, is rooted in a self-centered motive: protecting one’s own power and status. That’s the core claim. And indeed, in Study 1, narcissistic CEOs tended to voice concerns about collaboration and learning, but their narcissism was not significantly tied to concerns about productivity itself. There’s a gap between the words and the motive.

The Question to Turn on Yourself

Here’s where it gets personal for someone running a remote organization. The first thing to do after reading this study isn’t to name someone who opposes remote work. It’s to turn the mirror on yourself.

Am I, a remote-first executive, free of this dynamic? The honest answer is probably no. The appetite for power and status is natural in itself, a matter of degree, and I carry it too. Choosing remote work doesn’t dissolve it. It only changes the channel through which it’s supplied.

The real hazard is the assumption that “because I champion remote work, I’m immune to the drive for power.” Remote organizations have their own versions of chasing power and status: dominating a debate through a long async document, measuring your influence by the count of Slack reactions, getting your preferences through in review. What this study confronts us with isn’t the simplistic “in-person is bad.” It’s the more universal question: a leader’s motives may be less about the organization than the leader believes.

So when I audit my own position on how we work, I try to ask myself this. Is this judgment for the sake of the organization’s outcomes, or for the sake of keeping myself at the center? If tomorrow the organization moved to a way of working in which I stood out not at all, could I welcome it? If I can’t honestly answer “yes,” I should suspect that my position has some self-regard mixed in. Precisely because self-diagnosis is unreliable, it’s worth keeping the question close at hand.

Scrutinizing the “Productivity” and “Culture” Explanations

The most practical implication of this research is that you shouldn’t take the stated reasons in a debate about how to work at face value. Productivity drops. Culture thins out. Collaboration is lost. Serendipitous learning doesn’t happen. Each is plausible, and each is a genuine weakness of remote work. Which is exactly why it’s hard to tell a real concern apart from a defense of power and status wearing the costume of a reason.

The tell, I think, is whether the claim takes a falsifiable form. “Productivity is dropping” invites the question: on which metric, over what window, by how much? You can look at the data and, if a fix improves it, change your mind. But when the talk stays in registers that can be neither measured nor refuted (“you really do need to be face to face,” “you can’t feel someone’s commitment unless they’re in the office”), you’re entitled to suspect something other than outcomes is mixed in. The CEO quotes in the paper line up squarely in that unfalsifiable register.

And don’t forget that return-to-office mandates carry real costs. As the paper notes, blanket in-person mandates lower employee satisfaction and retention, and they tend to drive attrition especially among senior, high-market-value talent. The cross-country data compiled by WFH Research likewise shows that flexible work has become a competitive edge in hiring and retention. If part of the motive for requiring office presence is the restoration of an executive’s personal power and status, then the organization is handing over its most expensive asset, its people, for that private satisfaction. That’s why this study shouldn’t be filed away as a bit of psychological trivia.

Remote Work Is Also a Governance Mechanism

So far, the paper’s content and the self-examination it prompts. Let me close with a view that steps a little further out, from the seat of someone running a remote organization: remote work isn’t merely a means to flexibility. It’s a governance mechanism that structurally disperses a leader’s power.

Invert the paper’s logic and you get this. If in-person work supplies power and status efficiently, then remote work is a mechanism that deliberately starves that supply. Everyone becomes the same-sized square on a video call. Decisions get left in writing as async documents. Directives are exposed to scrutiny as written logic rather than as volume of voice. These properties, uncomfortable for a narcissist, are desirable from a governance standpoint, because they pull authority apart from physical presence and push toward judging decisions on their substance.

A writing culture is the core of it, I think. In spoken meetings, the loudest voice, the highest title, and the mood of the room tend to sway the conclusion. Proposing in writing, reviewing asynchronously, and recording decisions dilutes that personal pressure. Not who said it, but what’s written. In an organization where that norm holds, there’s less room for a leader’s self-regard to bend the conclusion. Choosing remote work is, at the same time as gaining flexibility, a form of self-binding in which a leader deliberately restrains their own power. That’s how I understand it.

Of course, this is no panacea. A writing culture has its own concentrations of power in a different shape: the person who dominates through sheer volume of prose, the person who forces their preferences through in review. Remote work doesn’t automatically flatten power. Making the mechanism work requires transparency in decisions, the psychological safety for dissent to surface safely, and a structure in which no single executive decides unilaterally how everyone works. The paper itself recommends that when forming a committee to set remote-work policy, you consider members’ narcissistic tendencies and make the decision more collaborative. The very design of who decides how we work, and how, is a governance question.

Guarding Against Overreach

Having billed this as a step-removed reflection, I owe it to be honest about the caveats against over-generalizing this study.

First, narcissism is a continuum, and this is a story about correlation. You can’t diagnose an individual who opposes remote work as a narcissist, nor is anyone who champions remote work guaranteed to be humble. Second, although the effect survived controlling for the other Big Five and Dark Triad traits, this is a statistical average tendency, not a tool for explaining the one person in front of you. Third, in-person work does hold legitimate value that has nothing to do with self-regard: developing junior people, serendipitous conversation, building complex trust. Remote work is genuinely weaker at these, and refusing to admit it would be the mirror-image misuse of this research.

In other words, the paper isn’t saying “remote is right and coming in is wrong.” It’s saying that a debate about how to work can be contaminated by a variable separate from outcomes, a leader’s personal appetite for power and status, and that overlooking it can cost the organization dearly. For remote advocates and office advocates alike, the motive to scrutinize first is not the other side’s, but your own.

Conclusion

Let me condense what the Wharton research established, and what I’ve made of it from a remote organization’s seat, into three points.

Power and status are at the root of the resistance: three studies consistently showed that narcissistic leaders resist remote work less for the sake of productivity or culture than because it removes the power and status that being in person supplies
The motive to audit is your own: it’s easy to turn the mirror on others, but self-regard can operate, in a different form, on those pushing remote work too. Ask whether your position on how to work is falsifiable, and whether you could welcome a way of working in which you don’t stand out
Remote work is a governance mechanism: it pulls authority apart from physical presence and makes decisions get judged on their substance. A writing culture, and a design in which no one decides unilaterally, are what make that work

The paper ends on the line that the pursuit of authority and glory may be an enemy of flexibility. Turn it around, and choosing to go fully remote is a bet: an executive gives up a little of their own authority and glory, wagering on an organization where substance beats presence. To be faithful to that bet, the first thing is to keep doubting your own motives. That was the most practical piece of homework I took away from this study.

That’s a step-removed look at the research on narcissism and remote work, from the seat of someone helping run a fully remote organization.