Boffins peg narcissistic leadership as the real driver behind 'return to office' demands

OPINION Bosses say working from the office is all about productivity, but the truth is it's just a power trip driven by fear and narcissism. Executives who insist on people working from the office like to say it's all about productivity, culture, collaboration, and mentoring. Pull the other one; it has bells on. When executives demand that we "return to the office," they usually lean on a familiar set of talking points: remote work hurts productivity, people collaborate better in the office, and corporate culture only happens in the office. If you look closer, you'll see it's all malarkey. Recent research by Professor Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and two of his grad students found that one reason some bosses resist remote work may be a desire to preserve authority and status. Or, as the paper title so neatly puts it, "Worship me at the office altar: Why narcissistic leaders resist remote work." Over the decades, I've met and covered many top leaders, especially in tech, and I've found that all too many of them have narcissistic tendencies. Now, thanks to this study, I see this isn't just my experience. The paper is based on three studies that included Fortune 500 leaders. The researchers found: "Because in-person work offers richer channels for controlling and commanding reverence from employees, in their pursuit of authority and admiration, narcissists are likely to resist remote work." These managers argue that spontaneous hallway chats, whiteboard sessions, and faster decision cycles require colocation, especially for teams used to in‑person workflows. They insist that company culture only happens in the office and that loyalty, engagement, and shared identity are impossible to sustain remotely. They also frequently say juniors cannot be effectively trained without being in the office near seniors to absorb knowledge and norms. In my experience, leaders who teach are vanishingly rare. Companies talk a good game. The reality is something else. According to Gallup's latest American Job Quality Study, only 28 percent of workers get any mentoring. Even if you consider that a somewhat successful number, a closer look reveals that much of this mentoring consisted of a few early meetings, followed by the mentor putting off the junior employee as "real work" got in the way. Mentoring is a good idea, but without follow-through, it's a waste of time. The main reason self-absorbed bosses like to give is that remote work is less productive. For instance, Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase's CEO, has long argued that remote work does not work well for people who want to "hustle" and advance. David Solomon, Goldman Sachs' CEO, famously called remote work an "aberration" that the firm would "correct as quickly as possible." You'll find this attitude in tech companies as well. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, for example, said in 2024 that Google was losing the AI race because "Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning. And the reason startups work is that people work like hell. I'm sorry to be so blunt, but the fact of the matter is… you're not going to let people work from home and only come in one day a week if you want to compete against the other startups." Schmidt later rowed back on that opinion, admitting his "error" amid something of a backlash. I am so sick of that "startup" BS. Google, AWS, Microsoft, Meta, IBM, and all the rest that like to say they're rebuilding a startup work-from-the-office culture, are full of crap. Multiple billion-dollar companies are promising today's workers a shot at making millions from an IPO. They're working for a paycheck. Oh, and today, Google looks to be just fine in the AI race. Ego-driven management also relies on the old factory mentality that holds that the best workers are the ones who arrive early, work late, and are seen hustling by the bosses. Putting in 80-hour workweeks may be necessary at a startup, but in most businesses, that's as stupid as measuring programmers' productivity by lines of code or, more recently, by how many AI tokens they use. The simple truth is that, except for cherry-picked studies, such as the WFH Research's report, which found that fully remote work is associated with roughly 10 to 20 percent lower productivity, most studies find that people who work from home are happier and tend to be as productive, if not more so, than those stuck in the office. Staff forced to work from the office don't even make their employers more profitable. The bottom line is that many people love working from home – I'm one of them – and bosses who insist you must work from the office tend to be narcissistic jerks. If you have bosses like that and you're a worker bee, I encourage you to look for another, more remote-friendly employer. If you're in charge of a company and you have middle managers like that, I encourage you to look to AI to replace them. Yeah, I said it. These days, another reason such managers may want to keep people under their thumb is they know that while AI can't replace good managers, most managers can be dumped. Many of them are scared to death that someone will realize they're just messengers and meeting‑makers who contribute nothing to the company's bottom line. Worse still, from where they sit, they fear, with reason, that AI-driven services such as Jira, Asana AI, and ServiceNow can replace them in a heartbeat. I think that's a fine fate for narcissistic bosses. Fire them all and let unemployment sort them out! ®