--- title: "Study Links Return-to-Office Mandates to CEO Narcissism" description: "A six-year study of 259 Fortune 500 chief executives finds that the leaders most likely to demand a return to the office score higher on measures of narcissism — suggesting some mandates are driven by a taste for visible authority as much as by any productivity evidence." category: "Companies" category_url: https://boursel.com/category/companies author: "Marcus Feldman" published: 2026-06-25T10:42:00.000Z updated: 2026-06-25T10:42:00.000Z canonical: https://boursel.com/article/study-links-return-to-office-mandates-to-ceo-narcissism tags: ["return-to-office", "leadership", "remote-work", "management", "workplace"] --- # Study Links Return-to-Office Mandates to CEO Narcissism A six-year study of 259 Fortune 500 chief executives finds that the leaders most likely to demand a return to the office score higher on measures of narcissism — suggesting some mandates are driven by a taste for visible authority as much as by any productivity evidence. Why do some bosses insist everyone come back to the office? New research offers an uncomfortable answer for at least some of them: it may have less to do with productivity than with the chief executive's ego. ## What the study found The work was conducted by the Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant with doctoral researchers Marissa Shandell and Courtney Elliott, drawing on six years of research, and was presented by Grant in a New York Times opinion piece, [as reported by Fortune](https://fortune.com/2026/06/25/return-to-office-ceos-ego-research/). The researchers analyzed **259 Fortune 500 CEOs**, and found that the trait that most consistently predicted opposition to remote and hybrid work was **narcissism** — a tendency toward self-importance and entitlement. The higher a leader scored, the more they favored bringing employees back full-time. To gauge narcissism without asking executives directly, the team used established indirect measures: the size of a CEO's **signature** in company reports, the size of their **photo** in those reports, and their pay relative to the next-highest-paid executive. Prior academic research has used each as a proxy for a leader's self-regard. The researchers summarized the mechanism simply: power is easier to perform in person. A separate experiment reinforced the point. CEOs prompted to think about commanding, high-profile leaders showed markedly greater resistance to working from home than a control group — suggesting that activating feelings of status and dominance pushes executives toward office mandates. ## The wider return-to-office debate The finding lands in the middle of one of the most contested management questions since the pandemic. Many of the largest employers — among them Amazon, JPMorgan Chase and the U.S. federal government — have moved to five-day in-office requirements, rolling back the hybrid flexibility that spread after 2020. The productivity case for doing so is mixed. Research led by the Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom has repeatedly found that well-designed hybrid arrangements maintain or modestly improve output, particularly for focused work, even as remote-heavy setups carry real costs in spontaneous collaboration and the training of junior staff. In short, the evidence does not cleanly favor either full-office or fully-remote work — which is part of what makes the personality finding notable. Grant's study does not claim every mandate is misguided or that offices have no value; its narrower point is that the personality of the leader issuing the order is itself a statistically meaningful predictor of whether the order comes at all. ## Why it matters for business The implications run to talent and trust. Flexibility has become a prized, non-salary benefit, and mandates seen as arbitrary — driven by a boss's preference rather than a clear operational rationale — risk pushing skilled workers who have options to leave. Research on workplace fairness suggests that *how* a decision is made, and whether employees see it as consistent and explainable, affects engagement as much as the decision itself. For boards and compensation committees, the study adds to a body of evidence that a CEO's personality can shape concrete, costly operating choices. ## A measured read It is one study, and worth treating as such. The narcissism proxies — signature and photo size, pay gaps — are indirect and imperfect; a large signature is not proof of anything on its own, and pay ratios reflect industry and firm size too. The sample is limited to Fortune 500 chiefs, and the findings were presented partly through opinion journalism, which limits independent replication so far. What the research adds is a credible, data-grounded hypothesis to a debate often long on conviction and short on evidence: that some of the push back to the office reflects who is giving the order, not just what the office is for. ## Sources - [Fortune 500 bosses demanding staff return to the office share one trait: narcissism, research finds](https://fortune.com/2026/06/25/return-to-office-ceos-ego-research/) - [Return-to-office mandates linked to narcissistic leaders, researchers claim](https://hrreview.co.uk/hr-news/strategy-news/return-to-office-mandates-linked-to-narcissistic-leaders-researchers-claim/389034)