It's All about Me: Narcissistic Chief Executive Officers and Their Effects on Company Strategy and Performance

February 16, 2021 Jeremiah Hendren

It's All about Me: Narcissistic Chief Executive Officers and Their Effects on Company Strategy and Performance

Chatterjee*, Arijit, and Donald C. Hambrick**
Administrative Science Quarterly 52, no. 3 (2007): 351-386
https://doi.org/10.2189/asqu.52.3.351

* Professor at ESSEC
** Professor at Smeal, Penn State University

Journalists, other analysts, and citizen-observers often comment on, and usually bemoan, the narcissistic tendencies of some business leaders (e.g., Vogel, 2006). At the same time, some writers point to the benefits of narcissism, as when Deutschman (2005: 44) said, “Narcissists are visionaries …, which can make them excel as innovators,” and when Maccoby (2003: xiv) asked, “Why do we go along for the ride with narcissistic leaders? Because the upside is enormous.” Apart from qualitative descriptions (e.g., Kets de Vries, 1994; Lubit, 2002), however, organizational researchers have not systematically examined this fundamentally important executive trait. Highly narcissistic CEOs—defined as those who have very inflated self-views and who are preoccupied with having those self-views continuously reinforced (Campbell, Goodie, and Foster, 2004)— can be expected to engage in behaviors and make decisions that have major consequences not only for the individuals who interact directly with them but also for broader sets of stakeholders. […] The question of whether CEOs are more narcissistic, on average, than the general population is incidental to our theorizing, but still useful to consider. On the one hand, narcissism drives people to assume positions of power and influence (Kernberg, 1975), and the self-esteem associated with narcissism helps in professional advancement (Raskin, Novacek, and Hogan, 1991), so one might anticipate that CEOs will tend, on average, to be more narcissistic than the general population. On the other hand, very high levels of narcissism might be so interpersonally alienating and engender such flawed decisions that extreme narcissists may be unlikely to rise to the tops of organizations. Despite our uncertainty about the average level of narcissism among CEOs, we anticipate that they vary in their degree of narcissism, just as they have been shown to vary on other personality dimensions (Miller and Toulouse, 1986; Gupta and Govindarajan, 1984). There may be very few CEOs who have little narcissism, and there may be few who have exceedingly high levels, but we can expect variance otherwise, with a range of narcissism levels represented in executive populations.

Arijit Chatterjee & Donald Hambrick

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