Narcissism spells success

Some social scientists have long suspected a link between narcissism and entrepreneurial success. Think Ted Turner, George Steinbrenner and the Donald.

“Well, think again,'' say Arijit Chatterjee and Donald C. Hambrick of Penn State University's business school, Pennsylvania, USA. They measured narcissistic tendencies of chief executives of major software and hardware companies by the length of each CEO's ‘Who's Who' entry, prominence of their photos in annual reports and the number of times the exec was mentioned in company news releases, among other things. Then researchers compared the CEO's narcissism score with the company's performance.

“Narcissistic CEOs tend to generate more extreme performance — more big wins and big losses — than their less narcissistic counterparts,'' the researchers wrote in a paper presented recently at the Academy of Management annual meeting.

But they also concluded that those big gains and losses tended to cancel each other out, and that narcissists were no more or less successful than their modest peers.

— Los Angeles Times-Washington Post