Signs of Narcissism? Reconsidering a Widely Used Measure

Abstract

Recent research on CEOs’ narcissism has mostly used unobtrusive measures, even though such measures have not been validated sufficiently. In two settings (Study 1 with 601 participants from various occupations and Study 2 with 97 managing directors), we analyze the construct validity of the commonly used narcissism index (NI). We find that the NI is only moderately correlated with the established and validated Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI), which calls into question the convergent validity of the NI. We further alter the company’s financial performance in our simulation to test whether performance affects the NI. Results show that individuals have different levels of NI after a period with a high compared with a low financial performance. This casts doubt on previous findings in organizational research using the NI and other unobtrusive measures because it reverses the common assumption of cause and effect.

CEO Narcissism and Credit Ratings

“…These measures have been employed by several CEO narcissism studies (Aktas et al, 2016;Capalbo et al, 2018;Olsen & Stekelberg, 2016;Olsen et al, 2014). Despite the extensive use of the narcissistic index (NI) in prior research, NI has been criticized because of its limited empirical validation and, relatedly, because it may reflect personality traits different from narcissism (e.g., Carey et al, 2015;Hill et al, 2014;Koch-Bayram & Biemann, 2020). 6 In summary, several measures of narcissism have been used in prior research.…”