Why narcissistic leaders resist remote work

Even if one were to grant the conclusion — leaders resist remote work to preserve their "power and status" — to what extent is the magnitude and success of a company (or for that matter, any serious enterprise) a direct function of its leader's ability to:

- Exercise authority / power

- Maintain status within the hierarchy

As in - who wants to work for a leader who is neither powerful nor high-status within their own company? Who consciously chooses a leader who is neither effective in getting people to do the right things, nor effective in commanding a (somewhat faith-based) trust in their long-term vision?

The study feels extremely leading in its idea of what a "good" leader would look like (presumably "hands off," leaves everyone alone such that good outcomes simple "emerge", etc) -- while treating this bent as obvious truth.

I say this as someone who spent the last 6 years straight working remotely (also having been successful in contributing impact).

Sometimes they are just too addicted to gossip by the water cooler. For all the information that flies in and out of different teams, departments and organisations, water cooler is probably the best place to learn enough to position yourself in the company. A narcissistic boss would be obsessed with that, naturally, and consider others who don't as outliers.

I will never work somewhere again where I can't work remote.

Might the Evil Overlord List be due for an update?

Related:

Fortune 500 bosses demanding staff RTO share 1 trait: Narcissism, research finds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48682333 - June 2026

The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day: Narcissism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48639459 - June 2026

What I'm feeling is that this narcissistic personality might actually be a signal that society rewards. I saw a news report recently saying that narcissistic traits are often found in successful CEOs.

In my view, maybe society is designed in a way that makes it hard for people without narcissism to succeed. It's like bad money driving out good.

Most successful VC leaders in the US are generally considered to have narcissistic traits. Why is that? VCs are inherently dealing with uncertainty in their investments. Grandiose delusions and absolute conviction get packaged as 'vision' and 'confidence.' Elon Musk's space data center project might look physically implausible, but some famous VCs see it as vision.

Narcissistic leadership is an extreme high-risk, high-return play. They ignore others' advice and bet on their own intuition. If they succeed, it's called innovation (Tesla, Apple). If they fail, it becomes WeWork. We only ever see the narcissists who won, but on the flip side, that's exactly what society rewards as a signal.

Society can't measure actual ability directly. So it looks for proxy signals. But vision, grandiosity, self-promotion, and actual performance are hard to distinguish. In a mass market, someone who speaks loudly gets famous before someone who quietly does good work.

Narcissism is advantageous in this selection stage. People say the preliminaries don't matter, only the finals do. But without the preliminaries, there's no finals, and in the preliminaries, narcissism is almost always advantageous.

Summarizing the papers I've read, narcissistic leaders tend to resist pushback because face-to-face environments where their power and status can be checked are reduced over time. And our society has built a system that rewards exactly that.

So rationally, we all know that this is wrong, that we should respect others, and that we should cut down our own egos. But the capitalist system seems to run in the exact opposite direction.

I get the attempt to make these arguments, but on the face and common sense of it, remote work promotes narcissistic behavior far more than some CEO does. The CEO wants the company to succeed.