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; the CEO’s prominence in a company’s press releases; the CEO’s use of first-person singular pronouns (eg I, me and my) in interviews; and the CEO’s compensation divided by that of the second-highest paid executive in the firm.

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

Inspired by findings in psychology, some researchers have even used the size of a CEO’s signature as a proxy for narcissism – a larger, more flamboyant signature being linked to a higher level of narcissism.

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

How social media reveals 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 instance, a recent study by Sebastian Junge, Lorenz Graf-Vlachy, Moritz Hagen and Franziska Schlichte analysed managers’ LinkedIn profiles to develop a multidimensional index of narcissism. Building on the DSM’s components of narcissism, the authors identified five features of a profile that may signal narcissistic tendencies: the number of pictures of the executive; the length of the “About” section; the number of listed professional experiences; the number of listed skills; and the number of listed credentials. They then combined these indicators to create an overall index of managerial narcissism.

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

The takeaway is encouraging: we don’t always need a personality test to spot narcissistic leaders – their words, images and online profiles can reveal a great deal. These tools offer employees, investors and board members a way to better recognize narcissistic tendencies in managers and adjust their decisions and interactions accordingly. And there’s still huge potential for being creative: building on psychologists’ insights into narcissistic behaviors, we could explore psycholinguistic dictionaries of narcissistic rhetoric and even, more eccentrically, analyse facial features such as eyebrow distinctiveness.

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This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Ivana Vitanova, EM Lyon Business School

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Ivana Vitanova ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.