‘Is my boss a narcissist?’ How researchers look and listen for clues

Between the public outbursts of today’s business icons and the recent lawsuits against prominent CEOs, narcissistic managers have been firmly in the spotlight. In academia, the fascination with the powerful mix of charisma and ego that defines narcissistic leaders has fueled nearly two decades of extensive research and analysis. Yet one of the central challenges of this work is measuring: How can we identify and assess narcissism in managers outside of a clinical setting? Because it is rarely possible to administer traditional psychometric tests to top executives, management scientists have developed a range of clever, unobtrusive ways to identify narcissistic tendencies by observing behavior, language and public presence.

Narcissism: the traditional measure

According to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), “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 in 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 origins in clinical psychology, the DSM definition is also widely accepted for defining narcissism in its non-clinical form.”

Research in psychology traditionally assesses narcissism through self-report tests or third-party psychometric tests. As first explained by RA 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 like to be the center of attention” vs “it makes me uncomfortable to be the center of attention“, And “I’m just like everyone else” vs “I am an extraordinary person”.

Although 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 eligible 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.

Discovering narcissistic traits in interviews and official communications

One of the first studies of managerial narcissism was developed in 2007 by Arijit Chatterjee and Donald C. Hambrick. After consulting with corporate communications experts, they followed Emmons’ principle and identified four possible signs of narcissism in the public behavior of CEOs. These were the prominent features of the CEO’s photo in a company’s annual report; the prominence of the CEO in a company’s press releases; the CEO’s use of first-person pronouns (e.g., I, me, and my) in interviews; and the CEO’s compensation divided by that of the second-highest paid executive in the company.

Later research expanded this approach to include new indicators, such as the number of lines in a CEO’s official biography or the number of awards listed in his self-description. Other studies zoomed in on more specific linguistic signals – such as the ratio of singular pronouns to plural pronouns (e.g. we, us and ours) in CEO press releases.

Inspired by findings from psychology, some researchers have even used the size of a CEO’s signature as a measure of narcissism; a larger, more flamboyant signature is linked to higher levels of narcissism.

Read more: Signature size and narcissism – a psychologist explains a long-ago discovery that helped make the connection

Importantly, many of these studies have validated their unobtrusive measures against traditional personality tests, finding strong correlations with established instruments such as the NPI. This evidence suggests that we can reliably detect narcissistic tendencies in leaders by observing their behavior and communication.

How social media exposes narcissistic traits in managers

In recent years, the rise of social media has given researchers unprecedented opportunities to observe how managers present themselves to the public, opening a new window into their narcissistic behavior. For example, a recent study by Sebastian Junge, Lorenz Graf-Vlachy, Moritz Hagen and Franziska Schlichte analyzed the LinkedIn profiles of managers to develop a multidimensional index of narcissism. Building on the DSM components of narcissism, the authors identified five characteristics of a profile that may indicate narcissistic tendencies: the number of photos of the supervisor; the length of the ‘About’ section; the number of professional experiences stated; the number of skills listed; and the number of login details listed. They then combined these indicators to create an overall index of managerial narcissism.

Admittedly, research that uses only social media profiles may focus on the most narcissistic managers, because less narcissistic managers, for example, do not always have a presence on LinkedIn. Furthermore, social psychology research suggests that social media itself encourages overly narcissistic communication by encouraging self-promotion. To help address these concerns, Junge et al. gave managers without LinkedIn profiles the lowest possible narcissism score and included them in their overall analysis. Their research found strong correlations between the LinkedIn-based measure and previous, unremarkable measures of narcissistic CEO behavior, as well as traditional psychometric tests such as the NPI.

The conclusion is encouraging: we don’t always need a personality test to spot narcissistic leaders – their words, images and online profiles can reveal a lot. These tools provide employees, investors and board members with a way to better recognize narcissistic tendencies in managers and adjust their decisions and interactions accordingly. And there is still enormous potential to be creative: building on psychologists’ insights into narcissistic behavior, we could explore psycholinguistic dictionaries of narcissistic rhetoric and even, more eccentrically, analyze facial features such as the characteristics of eyebrows.

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