Between the public extravagances of today’s business icons and the recent trials of prominent CEOs, narcissistic managers have firmly taken the spotlight. In academia, the fascination with the potent mix of charisma and ego that defines narcissistic leaders has fuelled nearly two decades of extensive research and analysis. Yet one of the central challenges of this work is measurement: how can we identify and assess narcissism in managers outside a clinical setting? Since it’s rarely possible to administer traditional psychometric tests to top executives, management scholars have developed a range of clever, unobtrusive ways to identify narcissistic tendencies by observing behavior, language, and public presence.
Narcissism: its traditional measurement
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association, “narcissistic personality disorder is defined as a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (sense of superiority in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and occurring in a variety of contexts.” In their 2020 article in the Journal of Management, authors Ormonde Rhees Cragun, Kari Joseph Olsen and Patrick Michael Wright write that “despite its origin in clinical psychology, the DSM’s definition is also widely accepted for defining narcissism in its nonclinical form”.
Research in psychology traditionally assesses narcissism through self-report tests or third-party psychometric tests. As first outlined by R. A. Emmons in 1984, the basic principle of these tests is to link simple statements to the components of narcissism. The most widely used and empirically validated are the 40-item Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) and its shorter version, the NPI-16. The NPI asks respondents to choose between paired statements such as “I really like to be the center of attention” versus “it makes me uncomfortable to be the center of attention”, and “I am much like everybody else” versus “I am an extraordinary person”.
While a few studies have administered the NPI directly to top managers – or adapted it for third-party evaluations, asking employees or stakeholders to rate managers based on daily interactions – such approaches remain extremely rare due to limited access to suitable participants. Faced with these limitations, researchers in management and organizational studies have sought alternative ways to detect narcissism in leaders. They began by identifying behavioral and linguistic cues in CEOs’ official communications that could reflect one or more dimensions of narcissism. More recently, however, the rise of social media has provided researchers with new, more direct opportunities to observe and measure narcissistic behavior in real time.
Spotting narcissistic traits in interviews and official communications
One of the first studies to measure managerial narcissism was developed by Arijit Chatterjee and Donald C. Hambrick in 2007. After consulting with corporate communication experts, they followed Emmons’ principle and identified four potential signs of narcissism in CEOs’ public behavior. These were the prominence of the CEO’s photograph in a company’s annual report;