Study links return-to-office mandates to CEO egos
NEW YORK, UNITED STATES — A six-year study of Fortune 500 CEOs finds that narcissism — not productivity data — is the strongest predictor of which leaders impose return-to-office mandates, according to research co-authored by Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant.
The more leaders rate themselves, the more they demand the office
“The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status — and the more they favored return-to-office mandates,” said Grant.
The study constructed narcissism scores for Fortune 500 CEOs using behavioral proxies: the size of their signatures in official documents, the dimensions of their photographs in annual reports, and the gap between their own compensation and that of other senior executives.
Researchers used indirect behavioral markers — signature size, photo dimensions, executive pay gap — to build narcissism scores based on demonstrated behavior rather than self-reported personality, spanning six years of Fortune 500 CEO decisions.
The mechanism is about power, not productivity
“Power is easier to perform in person,” said Grant, naming the underlying dynamic that drives RTO mandates among high-narcissism CEOs — an observation the study validated through a separate experiment in which priming CEO egos with high-status leadership references measurably increased preference for in-office work.
Amazon’s Andy Jassy, JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, Instagram’s Adam Mosseri, and BlackRock’s Larry Fink are among the executives named in the study as prominent RTO mandate advocates.
Remote workdays currently account for 26% of fully paid U.S. workdays — a plateau that has resisted years of executive mandates and suggests the workforce has found a stable equilibrium that CEO preferences alone cannot displace.
Grant published the findings as a New York Times opinion, arguing that organizations should treat workforce policy with the same evidence standards they apply to other management decisions.
The study’s core implication is that the RTO debate is less a management science question than a corporate psychology question — and that the productivity case for mandatory in-office work has never been substantiated in the data.
For BPO and offshore staffing providers, this research is strategically useful. Grant’s findings give providers data-backed language to counter the ‘culture’ argument for on-site consolidation — positioning distributed delivery as the evidence-based model, not the compromise.
Providers that can cite this data in client conversations will have a stronger argument for flexible distributed work than those relying solely on cost savings.
