A six-year Wharton study suggests leaders who crave status and attention are driving the push back to the office—despite mixed evidence on productivity.
If you actually look at the evidence presented, they cite this 2019 meta-analysis in the Journal of Management: “Making CEO Narcissism Research Great [ew]: A Review and Meta-Analysis of CEO Narcissism”. On signature size, for which it found only two studies by nearly the exact same team, it remarked:
Ham[, Seybert, and Wang] (2018) and Ham, Lang, Seybert, and Wang (2017) employed an alternative unobtrusive measure of CEO narcissism by measuring the size and contents of a CEO’s signature in SEC filings (2 of 42 articles). Their rationale posits that a larger signature represents
the grandiose nature of a narcissist. To validate the measure, Ham et al. used student samples
in a laboratory setting. While the main advantage of the measure is that it captures a behavior
under the direct control of the CEO (i.e., his or her signature), the measure may not fully
capture narcissism’s multifaceted nature. Ham et al. also provided external validation by correlating the measure with employee ratings of CEO narcissism, as obtained by O’Reilly et al.
(2014). As this is a newer measure, it has seen limited use to date.
I still see this as some absolute TikTok narcissist-whisperer shit and emblematic of the worst of the reproducibility crisis and conclusion-chasing in the social sciences – sincere respect for the social sciences though I may have.
Edit: I will add that not Charles Ham, not Mark Lang, not Nicholas Seybert, and not Sean Wang are psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, or frankly fucking anything; they’re in business studies.
It sounds stupid to me too but I looked it up and it turns out there is a proven correlation between signature size and narcissism.
If you actually look at the evidence presented, they cite this 2019 meta-analysis in the Journal of Management: “Making CEO Narcissism Research Great [ew]: A Review and Meta-Analysis of CEO Narcissism”. On signature size, for which it found only two studies by nearly the exact same team, it remarked:
I still see this as some absolute TikTok narcissist-whisperer shit and emblematic of the worst of the reproducibility crisis and conclusion-chasing in the social sciences – sincere respect for the social sciences though I may have.
Edit: I will add that not Charles Ham, not Mark Lang, not Nicholas Seybert, and not Sean Wang are psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, or frankly fucking anything; they’re in business studies.