Chief executive officer (CEO) narcissism is an important area of research due to the strategic implications of how this multifaceted personality trait affects CEO behavior. This article presents a combined meta-analytic and narrative review of CEO narcissism and makes future research recommendations. Our review and meta-analytic findings lead to the creation of a framework for CEO narcissism research focused on narcissistic CEO supply, demand, behavior, and consequences. Additionally, our review identifies five methods of measuring CEO narcissism, each with strengths and weaknesses. We find that while extant findings exhibit common themes, such findings remain mixed and potentially dependent upon methods. We recommend that future research expand beyond the strategic consequences of CEO narcissism to consider additional foci of the research framework and its moderators. Additionally, we suggest that research can benefit from moving beyond the predominant theoretical lenses of upper echelons theory and leadership theory to the lenses of the extended agency model of narcissism, the admiration-versus-rivalry perspective of narcissism, and tournament theory.

We examine the effect of CEO narcissism on an especially aggressive form of corporate tax avoidance: tax sheltering. Narcissism is a multifaceted personality trait associated with a sense of superiority and a propensity to engage in questionable behavior. Narcissists feel that they are above the law and are aggressive in pursuing what they believe is theirs. Narcissists also possess heightened motivations to pursue rewards or desirable outcomes while only being weakly motivated to avoid negative outcomes. Consistent with these behavioral tendencies of narcissistic individuals, we document statistically and economically significant effects of CEO narcissism on the likelihood that the CEO's firm engages in corporate tax shelters. Our study contributes to the literature by documenting a mechanism through which the individual personality characteristics of the CEO can affect firm-level tax policies. JEL Classifications: H25; H26; M41.

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This study investigates the relationship between narcissistic personality characteristics in CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and financial performance measures of earnings-per-share (EPS) and stock valuation. Using panel data from 1992 through 2009, we show that firms with narcissistic CEOs have higher earnings-per-share and share price than those with non-narcissistic CEOs. We examine the mechanism driving the observed results and find that narcissistic CEOs are more likely to increase reported EPS through real and operational activities rather than accrual-based manipulations. The findings suggest that narcissistic personality characteristics of top executives affect financial performance measures through the executive's decisions and influence over the firm's operational activities rather than through accrual and accounting decisions.The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. The next section reviews prior literature and develops our research hypothesis. Following this we describe our method, including our sample and design. Then we present the analyses, results, and the tests of our hypotheses. Finally, we discuss implications and future research in our conclusion.