Wow, are we going to learn that sunny days tend to be warm, and the sky tends to be blue, next?
I’ve been saying this since the Return to Office shit started: A huge part of it is narcissist management that need the narcissistic supply of being able to excercise power and judgement over others, in person.
… the other part is that if you don’t actually need all that office space, well, then all the fraud and money laundering in commercial real estate gets significantly harder to hide.
you do have to be a narccist to become a ceo, upper-managment, or the csuites.
“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.
unobtrusive measures of narcissism via photo size, signature size, and relative compensation predicted greater resistance to remote work in public statements early in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dude, come the fuck on. I take psychology as a serious science, so this methodology legitimately offends me: signature size as a metric for narcissism? Get the actual fuck out of here. This reeks of a paper in search of a conclusion.
It sounds stupid to me too but I looked it up and it turns out there is a proven correlation between signature size and narcissism.
If you actually look at the evidence presented, they cite this 2019 meta-analysis in the Journal of Management: “Making CEO Narcissism Research Great [ew]: A Review and Meta-Analysis of CEO Narcissism”. On signature size, for which it found only two studies by nearly the exact same team, it remarked:
Ham[, Seybert, and Wang] (2018) and Ham, Lang, Seybert, and Wang (2017) employed an alternative unobtrusive measure of CEO narcissism by measuring the size and contents of a CEO’s signature in SEC filings (2 of 42 articles). Their rationale posits that a larger signature represents the grandiose nature of a narcissist. To validate the measure, Ham et al. used student samples in a laboratory setting. While the main advantage of the measure is that it captures a behavior under the direct control of the CEO (i.e., his or her signature), the measure may not fully capture narcissism’s multifaceted nature. Ham et al. also provided external validation by correlating the measure with employee ratings of CEO narcissism, as obtained by O’Reilly et al. (2014). As this is a newer measure, it has seen limited use to date.
I still see this as some absolute TikTok narcissist-whisperer shit and emblematic of the worst of the reproducibility crisis and conclusion-chasing in the social sciences – sincere respect for the social sciences though I may have.
Edit: I will add that not Charles Ham, not Mark Lang, not Nicholas Seybert, and not Sean Wang are psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, or frankly fucking anything; they’re in business studies.
thank you for this thoughtful comment. i was scrolling, hoping in vain for someone to bring up reproducibility, kr more specifically, HARCing
I had the same reaction to that paragraph, but the very next paragraph is more compelling:
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.
I agree with your skepticism about the metric, but there’s a gigantic example to be found in the oval office…
Could I then use this handwriting phrenology to claim that Jimmy Carter was a bigger narcissist than Barack Obama was a slightly bigger narcissist than Adolf Hitler?
I understand they’re considering other factors, but this is so obviously fucking stupid.
Time to focus on the other factors, all these studies have loose edges. It comes from using subjective measurements. The results are in line with what we know about CEOs so it’s tempting to get onboard.
But I thought narcissism was a prerequisite to be a CEO?
I would love for Mike Judge to make Home Office Space about how Initec.AI (rebrand) is forcing workers back into the office
Millennials are at that stage for sure, with enshittification, AI, and the xxteenth generational crisis in a row.
With the new King of the Hill and even the Beavis and Butthead revival a bit ago, wouldn’t be a bad time for it IMO
It would be a good short, for sure. Not enough there for a full length movie, IMHO.
I’m sure there will soon be some sort of zoomer sees “office space” for the first time YouTube videos. They’ll then realize GenX “gets it” or something.
Those videos exist and it fuels my pitch black heart seeing them
I’m not surprised, but now I have to look for it. We’ve remained unseen by Society for the last 40 years. It’s kind of surreal to see the stuff with GenX references right now.
…and gen-x will not be affected by zoomie acceptance…
Fortune, you pushed for all of this shit.
Guess which (only) trait all the captured Nazis in Nuremberg shared?
Yeah, our society is not a good place to be in.
All “bosses” you need it to climb the capitalist ladder.
Capitalists: people who need a peer reviewed study to realize they’re assholes.
Narcissists tend to see narcissism as a positive.
So it’s more like, “people wish they had as much confidence and self esteem as I do.”
I have a motivational quote for them!
“Everybody has a plan, untill they get punched in the mouth.”
The want to see their monkeys in one cage.
I mean really why pay rents for the new open office concept if it doesn’t feed their ego???
If I can save money hiring women a .76% and no rent I’m in!
They want people fawning in person, remote fawning is not so moist xxx
I feel they could rewrite the article title to be Fortune 500 companies share narcissistic traits and it would still be true.
I’m a firm believer in that you can’t get to a high level of anything without having some form of narcissistic or selfish traits.
I mean, this has been well established by various psychological studies for like 30 years now, at least.
You don’t have a belief, you have an accurate understanding of reality.
Higher ups in most hierarchichal organizations are significantly more narcissistic than average people.
Written by AI.
Wharton? Oh please …
