CEOs have offered many different reasons for calling workers back into the office—despite research that suggests working from home can be as effective, if not more effective, than in-office work.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a return-to-office memo that “collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective” in person, and that “teaching and learning from one another are more seamless.” Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said his five-day in-office mandate would increase creativity, and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink even suggested that getting employees back into the office could help offset inflation. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon famously derided video-call-heavy remote work as “management by Hollywood Squares,” and has argued that in-person work is crucial for mentoring, fostering innovation, and maintaining corporate culture.
But there may be another reason for work-from-home crackdowns and in-office mandates that CEOs haven’t mentioned: their own egos.
A new study from Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant and coauthors Marissa Shandell and Courtney Elliott found that leader narcissism was associated with greater resistance to remote work. A big reason? Power trips are easier to stage in person.
“In leadership roles, narcissists have a clear preference for face-to-face interaction, where richer channels allow them to not only gain attention but also wield power and status,” the authors write. Remote settings curtail leaders’ usual means of “directing and inspiring employees” like using hand gestures, fluctuating the volume of their voice, making eye contact, and adjusting their posture. “When communicating by video, phone, email, or text, it is more difficult for leaders to command the attention—and gauge and bask in the admiration—of their employees,” the authors write.
As part of their six-year study, which included large-scale surveys, the authors established proxies for measuring Fortune 500 CEOs’ egos, such as the size of their pay packages, the size of their signatures in company reports, and the size of their photos in company reports.
CEOs with higher narcissism scores were more likely to seek more status, such as becoming chair of their company board, and were more likely to make negative statements about remote and hybrid work early in the pandemic.
In another experiment, the authors primed CEOs’ narcissistic self-image by asking them to reflect on the role that a bold, assertive ego played in the successes of Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison. Afterward, leaders who’d been primed were more likely to oppose working from home, compared with those who weren’t primed. This, the researchers concluded, suggests a causal link between activating ego and opposing remote work.
“The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status—and the more they favored return-to-office mandates,” the authors wrote in a New York Times opinion piece.
The authors warn that CEOs’ egos may be blinding them to the upside of more flexible working arrangements—a perk employees love—and motivating them to impose full-time in-office mandates that could backfire.
The study should be a wake-up call for leaders: There may be totally legitimate reasons to call employees back into the office, but massaging the boss’s ego isn’t one of them.