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“Highly narcissistic CEOs — defined as those who have very inflated self-views and who are preoccupied with having those self-views continuously reinforced — can be expected to … generate more extreme and irregular performance than non- narcissists, although they do not generate systematically a better or worse performance.”
The study is by Arijit Chatterjee, a graduate lecturer, and Donald Hambrick, Smeal Chaired Professor of Management. They measured the level of narcissism in 111 CEOs of computer software and hardware companies, then compared it to the subsequent strategies and performance of their companies. Their interesting, if perhaps arguable, indicators of narcissism are: "The prominence of the CEO's photograph in the company's annual report; the frequency of the CEO's name appearing in company news releases; the use of first person singular pronouns (I, me, mine, my, and myself) by the CEO in interviews; and the CEO's cash and non-cash pay compared to the company's second highest executive." The study is coming out in the next Administrative Science Quarterly.
