A new Wharton study says narcissism, not productivity, is the trait that best predicts who bans remote work. The financial data says the mandates do not pay off anyway.
Researchers at the Wharton School argue that the single personality trait that consistently predicts a leader’s opposition to remote work is narcissism, not concern for productivity, collaboration, or culture. Separately, large studies of S&P 500 firms find that strict return-to-office mandates raise turnover and do nothing measurable for financial returns.
For six years, the conventional defense of the five-day office has been some version of “people work better together.” The numbers never quite backed it up, and now a team of organizational psychologists is offering a blunter explanation for why bosses keep insisting anyway: it feels good to be the center of attention, and a room full of direct reports delivers that in a way a grid of muted Zoom squares never will.
What Happened
In a June 22 guest essay for The New York Times, Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant and Ph.D. candidates Marissa Shandell and Courtney Elliott published findings from six years of surveys covering thousands of executives, middle managers, and frontline supervisors. They tested a range of personality traits against each leader’s stance on hybrid and remote work.
Their headline result: the stance did not correlate with how much leaders trusted employees or how much they enjoyed being around people. The trait that did predict resistance to remote work was narcissism, defined as a tendency toward self-centeredness and entitlement. The higher leaders scored, the more they favored return-to-office mandates.
The authors say the link held for Fortune 500 chief executives too. Unable to measure egos directly, they used proxies that prior research treats as narcissism markers: the size of pay packages, the size of signatures, and the prominence of the CEO’s own photo in company reports. Leaders who scored high on that index were more likely to chase board seats and chairman titles, and made the most negative public statements about remote work in the early pandemic years.
The Backstory
The mandate wave is real and still building. About a third of U.S. firms now require full-time in-person attendance, according to workforce tracker Flex Index. A JLL survey put 55% of Fortune 100 companies on a five-day requirement, up from roughly 5% in 2021. Recent additions include Stellantis, Home Depot, Instagram, Paramount, and Novo Nordisk, with many enforcement deadlines landing across 2026.
The official reasons are familiar: productivity, collaboration, culture, mentorship. The trouble is that the productivity case has thin evidence behind it. Several studies find no performance penalty when employees work hybrid, and some find a small gain once commuting and office interruptions are removed from the equation.
The Plan
Grant’s team frames the ego explanation as causal, not just correlational. In one experiment, they had leaders reflect on the role a bold, assertive ego played in the success of Steve Jobs at Apple and Larry Ellison at Oracle. After that exercise, the same leaders were more likely to oppose remote work.
The mechanism the authors propose is straightforward. Narcissism, they argue, runs on a steady supply of attention and validation. The office delivers it. A leader can hover, summon people to a conference room, and command a live audience. Remote work cuts off the supply, replacing reverence with delayed Slack replies and the occasional barking dog. The piece does not claim every leader who dislikes remote work is an egomaniac, only that, on average, self-centered leaders struggle most with employees choosing where they work.
The Business Model Angle
Strip away the psychology and the operator question is simpler: does forcing five days in the office create value or destroy it? The weight of the evidence points to destruction.
| What the research measures | Finding |
|---|---|
| Excess turnover after a strict RTO mandate | About 14% higher (University of Pittsburgh, S&P 500 firms) |
| Who leaves first | Senior, high-skill, and high-performing staff; women at nearly 3x the male rate (Baylor) |
| Improvement in firm financial performance | None measurable; mandates often followed stock-price dips, not preceded gains |
| Attrition under hybrid instead | Roughly a third lower, with no performance cost (Stanford) |
Read as a capital-allocation decision, a five-day mandate is a policy that pays nothing on the revenue line while quietly liquidating the most mobile and expensive part of the workforce. The people with the best outside options are the ones who walk, and they are also the most costly to replace. The companies most associated with hard mandates, including Amazon, have framed the move as a culture investment. The financial studies suggest it functions closer to a hidden severance program, which is exactly how several HR analysts now describe it: a way to shed headcount through attrition without the cost and optics of layoffs.
That reframing matters because it changes who should own the decision. If RTO were a productivity lever, it would sit with operations. If it is really a talent-and-cost lever with no measurable upside, it belongs in the same conversation as any other initiative that burns cash and assets for an unproven return.
The Risk
A skeptic should not swallow the ego thesis whole. The turnover and firm-value findings come from large datasets and are well replicated. The narcissism-causes-mandates claim is newer and rests in part on a single priming experiment, where reminding leaders about famous big egos nudged their stated preferences. That is suggestive, not settled, and an op-ed is not a peer-reviewed paper. Stated stance in a survey is also not the same as a boardroom decision shaped by real estate leases, tax incentives, and middle managers who conflate visibility with output.
There is also a real counterweight the authors acknowledge. Fully remote work past half the week can isolate people, weaken culture, and starve juniors of mentoring. Microsoft found new hires who spent even a couple of days a month with their managers were more satisfied and likelier to stay. The evidence-backed sweet spot is hybrid, not zero office and not five days. The ego story is the catchy part. The durable, actionable finding is the cost-benefit asymmetry of the extremes.
Quick Questions
What did the new research actually find?
That narcissism was the only personality trait that consistently predicted opposition to remote work among the leaders surveyed, more than trust in employees or sociability.
Do return-to-office mandates improve company performance?
Large studies of S&P 500 firms find no measurable improvement in financial returns after strict mandates, alongside a roughly 14% rise in turnover.
Who leaves when a company mandates five days?
Disproportionately senior, high-skill, and high-performing employees, and women at close to three times the rate of men, according to the Baylor brain-drain research.
Is hybrid better than full remote or full office?
The evidence favors hybrid. It lowers attrition by about a third versus full office while matching performance, and avoids the isolation that comes with working from home most of the week.
Is the “ego” explanation proven?
No. The turnover and firm-value findings are robust, but the causal ego claim leans on a single priming experiment and survey data, so treat it as a strong hypothesis rather than a settled fact.
The Business Model Analyst Take
The provocative line here is that your CEO bans remote work because they like being worshipped. It is a good headline and the data behind it is at least directionally interesting. But founders and operators should not get distracted by the personality diagnosis, because the more useful conclusion sits one level down and is far better evidenced.
Office policy is a capital-allocation decision wearing a culture costume. A strict five-day mandate spends real money and real talent for a return the financial studies cannot find. Hybrid, in the two-to-three-day range, is the rare option that the evidence actually supports: it keeps the collaboration and mentoring upside, drops attrition by roughly a third, and costs nothing in output. If a leader is choosing the expensive option that destroys value over the cheaper one that preserves it, the relevant question is not whether they are a narcissist. It is whether the decision is being made on evidence at all. That is a question a board can act on. The ego diagnosis is just the part that goes viral.
Source: Adam Grant, Marissa Shandell, and Courtney Elliott, “The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week,” The New York Times, June 22, 2026. Supporting data from Flex Index, JLL, University of Pittsburgh (Ma), Baylor University, and Stanford WFH Research.
