Commentary: Want to work from home? Make sure your boss isn’t a narcissist

Commentary: Want to work from home? Make sure your boss isn’t a narcissist Amid AI angst and sweeping layoffs, the balance of power has swung back to managers, says Beth Kowitt for Bloomberg Opinion. NEW YORK: If you want the highest odds of maintaining a remote or hybrid work arrangement, make sure you’re not working for a narcissist. In the post-pandemic era, bosses have used all of corporate America’s favourite buzzwords - innovation, collaboration, culture, mentorship, productivity, performance - to rationalise calling workers back to the office five days a week. Cringey jargon aside, some of those justifications are reasonable and legitimate. But in a newly released research paper, Marissa Shandell, Courtney Elliott and Adam Grant of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School find that a boss’s objection to working from home is more likely to be driven by ego and a thirst for control and status than it is anything else. Their work tracks with a broader phenomenon I’ve been following for the last year and a half. Amid AI angst and sweeping layoffs, the balance of power has swung back to managers, and they are hungry to reassert and flaunt it in ways both big and small. As I’ve written, bosses - narcissistic or otherwise - are now in their command-and-control era, doing far less cajoling and convincing and much more demanding. The reemergence of do-as-I-say management has translated into suppressing employee dissent, expanding worker surveillance and slashing the benefits that were meant to attract and retain talent when the job market was tight. It has also led to a host of new rules and requirements - about how employees can express their personal views, even when they’re off the clock; about working in the office five days a week; and about not only what employees should wear but also how they should act. THE BIGGER THE EGO, THE MORE RESISTANCE TO REMOTE WORK The paper, aptly titled “Worship me at the office altar: Why narcissistic leaders resist remote work”, has the receipts to prove what many workers on the other end of the tightening leash have suspected: that often these decisions have very little to do with improving the business and everything to do with bosses flexing their power. The researchers found that narcissism was the only characteristic that dependably predicted resistance to remote work. The bigger the ego, the more an executive desired authority and acclaim, and, in turn, the more that boss wanted workers to get their butts back in their office desk chairs. In one of three studies the researchers conducted, they examined the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, using the size of their paychecks and signatures and photos in their company annual reports to measure their egos. (As someone who has fielded multiple phone calls over the years from a panicked PR person when their CEO dislikes the photo that was used in one of my pieces, I can confirm that this is a solid indicator of narcissism.) The higher the marks, the more likely they were to be chairmen of their own companies and join the boards of others - a contingent that made the most derogatory comments about working from home (i.e., “If you want to get paid New York rates, you work in New York”). A WAY OF REASSERTING DOMINANCE Why do egocentric leaders oppose remote work so much? Existing studies have in fact suggested that narcissists are drawn to the digital world because they can better curate and more broadly disseminate their image. But in this case, the researchers found that remote workplace interactions deprive them of what they crave most - power and status. It is harder for self-important bosses to refuel their “narcissistic supply” of attention and affirmation when they don’t have their usual tactics at their disposal (interrupting, speaking loudly, making intense eye contact or calling spontaneous meetings). The paper cites studies that found that on video calls, employees are more likely to flinch at the sight of their boss’s face and also more likely to look bored or tired than they are to show reverence. Employees can also exert their own newfound form of control by ignoring a Slack post or deleting an email. They can turn off their cameras on Zoom. Signifiers of workplace status, like office size and seating charts, evaporate. “This puts narcissistic leaders at risk of falling off the authority balance beam, as the balance of power tips too far toward employees,” the researchers write. Demanding that workers return to their desks five days a week is a way for threatened bosses to reassert their dominance. In case this needs to be said, clearly not every executive who wants workers back at the office five days a week is a narcissist. But the study helps us understand why return-to-office mandates have become such a powerful proxy of post-pandemic corporate life. The debate is not just about whether you’re logging in from your home or your office. More than anything else it is about power - who has it, who lost it and the lengths they’ll go to reclaim it.