Your CEO Misses the Applause
Someone actually measured it.
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For five years, the return-to-office (RTO) argument has been made in the language of output. Productivity. Culture. "The energy of being in a room together." Those explanations have always felt a little thin, and a team at Wharton decided to look underneath them.
Marissa Shandell, Courtney Elliott, and Adam Grant studied more than a thousand leaders across three studies. They measured narcissism the way researchers do: not with a personality quiz, but with the fingerprints leaders leave on their own companies. How big is the CEO's photo in the annual report? How large is his signature? How much more does he earn than the next-highest executive? These are surprisingly reliable proxies for ego.
The result: narcissism won. Across every control they threw at it (trust, industry, company size, every Big Five personality trait), leaders who scored higher on the ego index pushed harder to pull everyone back to the office. One of the studies nudged participants into a more narcissistic mindset in a controlled experiment, and resistance to remote work went up. Not just correlated. Caused.
The mechanism is not complicated. An office delivers something a video call cannot: the corner office, deference, the ability to hold the floor. For someone whose sense of self runs on attention and status, it reads like a demotion. The corner office becomes one square on a screen, the same size as everyone else's.
The researchers noticed something telling about how the ego-driven leaders justified the mandates: they cited collaboration and learning, not productivity. Even the leaders who scored highest for ego seem to have sensed the productivity argument wouldn't hold up, so they reached for reasons that are harder to disprove.
Which means arguing that you're productive from home was always the wrong game. The data settled that question years ago. The mandate kept going anyway, because the mandate was never really about the data.
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So what's the solve?β
What if we give CEOs a bigger box than everyone else on Zoom calls?
Okay but more seriously... we're not going to change the mind of a narcissist. There's no debate to win here, instead we need to build cultures where flexibility is structural. It is not a perk any single leader can rescind the week he misses being the biggest presence in the room. It is just how the place works. The bottom block of the company Jenga tower instead of the first thing CEOs feel drawn to grab at.
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This is one of the reasons Remotivated seeks to celebrate and elevate remote organizations: the ones with leaders focused on outputs, not ego.
