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This paper aims to explore how narcissistic traits and personality influence entrepreneurial behaviour. In entrepreneurship and psychology, research has shown that narcissism and personality have “productive” and “unproductive” influences on entrepreneurial activities. Therefore, this paper explores the entrepreneur from a social constructionist perspective by using the narrative from the emerging literature. The narrative focus is on narcissism, entrepreneurial personality and the intention to start a new venture, focusing on activities in the early stages of entrepreneurship.

This study draws upon the narcissism theory and the big five personality models. Using the conceptual model, the authors identify commonalities with entrepreneurial activities such as product and service development, market competitive strategies, marketing, networking, performance management, learning from failure and fund-raising activities. The conceptual framework demonstrates a connection between narcissism, the big five personality and entrepreneurial activities.

This study proposes an innovative conceptual framework for productive entrepreneurial behaviour. Productive traits of the grandiose narcissist are extraversion and openness to experience, which may have positive influences on the entrepreneurship process. Traits such as assertiveness, overconfidence and intellect have been found to be instrumental in resource acquisition activities. Findings also suggest that the grandiose narcissist will be high in openness to experience (intellect) and extraversion (excitement and social networking). The narcissist is most likely to choose an internal source of funding to protect their fragile ego and maintain control over their entities. Those with high extraversion and openness to experience may be more open to pursuing external sources of funding, as they are more inclined to have social networks and enjoy the external process. Though the study focuses on the “dark trait productivity” of narcissism, it is important not to overlook the damaging side of the narcissistic entrepreneur – “dark trait unproductivity”. The study also discusses the unproductive traits of narcissistic entrepreneurs, such as constantly chasing goals, deflecting and blaming the environment and others for failure, embarking on risky financial decisions, a lack of empathy in team dynamics and poor stakeholder management.

The influence of narcissism on entrepreneurial activities and its impact have gained traction among academia and practitioners. Yet, this is an insufficiently understood area of study and has not been explored in depth. Previous research has focused chiefly on entrepreneurial intentions in the context of entrepreneurship, and what influences the choice to start a business. There is limited research that bridges the gap between entrepreneurial finance and psychology–narcissism personality.

Literature has paid limited attention to narcissism’s influence on tourism. The pre-trip planning stage involves temporal psychological distance, where decision-making regarding the trip stretches over a period of time and occurs anytime during that period. Using narcissism theory and with temporal distance (6 months and 1 week before the trip) as the moderator, this study examines how tourists’ self-sacrificing self-enhancement and grandiose fantasy – grandiose narcissism facets – and travel motivations affect attraction visit intentions.

Partial least squares (PLS) analysis was applied on survey information obtained from 374 individuals (200 and 174 were six-months and one-week scenarios, respectively).

Grandiose narcissism facets affect motivations and visit intentions to various attractions at different temporal distances. The consequences of grandiose fantasy and self-sacrificing self-enhancement on motivation become evident as temporal distance decreases. At large temporal distances, grandiose fantasy positively influences social recognition motivation. At short temporal distances, it positively influences social recognition and ego and negatively influences scenery and relaxation motivations. Self-sacrificing self-enhancement positively influences socialization, exploration, scenery, relaxation and escape motivations at large temporal distances. At short temporal distances, self-sacrificing self-enhancement positively influences historical attraction visit intentions.

Grandiose narcissism facets’ influence on tourism is rarely examined. This study extends the temporal distance concept to the narcissism theory. It integrates the effects of grandiose narcissism and temporal distance on tourists’ motivations and different attraction type visit intentions and shows that motivation is temporally distance-specific.

This study investigates the impact of CEO narcissism on eco-innovation. Moreover, we explore the moderating influence of CEO ancestor origins and CEO tenure on this relationship.

Based on a comprehensive dataset comprising 198 non-financial U.S. firms spanning the years 2010–2021, we apply OLS regression.

Our research findings are as follows: (1) CEO narcissism negatively affects eco-innovation. (2) CEO ancestor origins play a moderating role, with this effect being attenuated for CEOs with ancestral origins from highly sustainable backgrounds. (3) CEO tenure strengthens the relationship between CEO narcissism and eco-innovation. This study sheds light on the significance of CEO personality traits in influencing eco-innovation decision-making. The results offer valuable insights for stakeholders, boards of directors and investors.

To the best of our knowledge, none of the studies on sustainable tools have examined the moderating effect of CEO demographics characteristics on the CEO personality traits –eco-innovation nexus, and this offers a great opportunity to make new contributions to the extant literature.

Prior research in psychology reports an age-based bias against narcissists. We examine whether managers' reactions to narcissistic subordinates exhibit a similar bias. Using an experimental method, where we manipulate subordinate narcissism, we find evidence of an age-based bias. Older managers react to a narcissistic subordinate by making conservative revisions to the subordinate's aggressive accounting estimates. They do so even at the cost of failing to meet a personally beneficial earnings target. A test of moderated mediation shows the actions of older managers (in their late 40s and older) were driven by their negative perceptions of the narcissistic subordinate. Our work demonstrates that not all individuals perceive narcissists the same way, and has implications for manger/subordinate relationships, and group dynamics involving mixed personalities and ages.

This study examines the effects of narcissism and bonus-based incentive plans on managerial decision-making performance. Using an experiment, the authors first examine decision choices under two levels of an incentive threshold (high and low). Narcissism is measured using the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI). Typically, the NPI is used as a single monolithic construct in analyses; however, in this study, the authors subdivide it in two ways to gain more nuanced information about its impact on decision making. First, the authors split the NPI into three levels – high, medium, and low (Hascalovitz & Obhi, 2015), and then decompose it into its adaptive and maladaptive components (Campbell, Hoffman, Campbell, & Marchisio, 2011) to examine how these subdivisions affect performance. Results show that the different levels of incentive thresholds affect performance among narcissistic individuals. Results indicate that individuals higher in narcissism and higher in levels of adaptive and maladaptive narcissism outperform their low-trait counterparts in a lower-threshold environment, but not in a high threshold environment.

We link counterproductive work behavior (CWB) (particularly workplace bullying) and organizational citizenship behavior to individual narcissism and organizational culture. We link counterproductive work culture in turn to organizations' leader(s), enumerating multiple roles an executive may play: actor, target, ignorer, enabler, rewarder, or, ultimately, champion of change. Both positive (citizenship) and negative (counterproductive) behaviors are associated with narcissism, a complex, multifaceted set of personality characteristics, primarily based on the individual's cognitive interpretation of self and the world. Theoretical interpretations of reactive CWB (stressor-emotion-control theory) and instrumental CWB (theory of planned behavior) support the development of coaching and counseling interventions. Cognitive behavioral theory (CBT)-based prescriptive executive coaching is proposed as a promising mechanism for redirecting narcissistic organizational players from counterproductive to citizenship schemas and behaviors.

This paper studies how employee effort depends upon the manager’s level of narcissism and the framing of the manager’s incentive scheme. In an online experiment with 356 employee participants, the authors manipulate the description of the manager narcissism (high or low) and the framing of the manager’s compensation scheme (bonus or penalty) and examine the joint effect of these two factors on employee effort to help the manager reach their objectives. Results show that employees exert less (more) effort when manager narcissism is high (low). This effect is mediated by employees’ feelings of envy toward the manager. In line with recent research on the cascading effect of management compensation, the authors also find that a manager’s penalty contract has a negative effect on employee effort when manager narcissism is high. The results have important implications for compensation design in business practice.

The purpose of this study is to examine the moderating effect of an exogenous corporate governance shock that curbs Chief Executive Officers’ (CEOs) power on the relationship between CEO narcissism and earnings management practices.

The authors performed a quasi-experiment using a differences-in-differences approach to examine Brazil’s duality split regulatory change on 101 Brazilian public firms during the period 2010–2022.

The main findings indicate that the introduction of duality split curtails the positive influence of CEO narcissism on earnings management, suggesting that this corporate governance regulation may act as a complementary corporate governance mechanism in mitigating the negative consequences of powerful narcissistic CEOs. Further robustness checks indicate that the results remain consistent after using entropy balancing and alternative measures of CEO narcissism.

In emerging markets, where governance systems are frequently perceived as less than optimal, policymakers and regulatory authorities can draw insights from this enforcement to shape governance systems, reducing CEO power and, consequently, improving the quality of financial reporting.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine whether a duality split mitigates the influence of CEO narcissism on earnings management. Thus, this study contributes to the corporate governance literature that calls for research on the effectiveness of external corporate governance mechanisms in emerging markets as well as the CEO narcissism literature that calls for research on moderating factors that could curtail negative consequences of narcissistic CEO behavior.

Counterproductive work behavior (CWB) imposes significant costs on organizations, thus antecedents of CWB are of particular interest to both practitioners and academics. The authors examine how one’s own narcissism interacts with co-worker narcissism to influence willingness to engage in retaliatory CWB against a co-worker.

The data for this study were obtained from Amazon Mechanical Turk participants and Master of Business Administration students, representing a cross-section of employee representatives.

The authors find that employees expect narcissistic co-workers to engage in continuing future CWB and this, in turn, increases employees' willingness to engage in retaliatory CWB. That is, non-narcissistic employees are provoked to engage in organizationally-destructive behaviors by peers perceived as narcissists. This affect is attenuated by the employee’s own narcissism. Relative to non-narcissists, narcissistic employees find a narcissistic co-worker more likeable, which reduces their willingness to engage in retaliatory CWB against the co-worker.

For corporations and HR managers, this study demonstrates the caution necessary when considering hiring and operational practices. Specifically, non-narcissists demonstrate increased willingness to engage in organizationally-destructive behaviors after interpersonal conflict with a narcissistic co-worker.

The authors extend prior research about interpersonal drivers of CWB, which primarily considered superior-subordinate dyad, by examining the joint effects of individual and co-worker narcissism in peer-to-peer relationships.

The purpose of our study is to study the impact of chief executive officer (CEO) optimism and narcissism on the company's capital structure.

(1) The authors opt for regression, machine learning and text analysis to explore the impact of narcissism and optimism on the capital structure. (2) We analyze CEO interviews and employ three methods to evaluate narcissism: the dictionary proposed by Anglin, which enabled us to assess the following components: authority, superiority, vanity and exhibitionism; count of first-person singular and plural pronouns and count of CEO photos displayed. Following this approach, we were able to make a more thorough assessment of corporate narcissism. (3) Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) technique helped to find the differences in the corporate rhetoric of narcissistic and non-narcissistic CEOs and to find differences between the topics of interviews and letters provided by narcissistic and non-narcissistic CEOs.

Our research demonstrates that narcissism has a slight and nonlinear impact on capital structure. However, our findings suggest that there is an impact of pessimism and uncertainty under pandemic conditions when managers predicted doom and completely changed their strategies. We applied various approaches to estimate the gender distribution of CEOs and found that the median values of optimism and narcissism do not depend on sex. Using LDA, we examined the content and key topics of CEO interviews, defined as positive and negative. There are some differences in the topics: narcissistic CEOs are more likely to speak about long-term goals, projects and problems; they often talk about their brand and business processes.

First, we examine the COVID-19 pandemic period and evaluate how CEO optimism and pessimism affect their financial decisions under specific external conditions. The pandemic forced companies to shift the way they worked: either to switch to the remote work model or to interrupt operations; to lose or, on the contrary, attract clients. In addition, during this period, corporate management can have a different outlook on their company’s financial performance and goals. The LDA technique helped to find the differences in the corporate rhetoric of narcissistic and non-narcissistic CEOs. Second, we use three methods to evaluate narcissism. Third, the research is based on a set of advanced methods: machine learning techniques (random forest to reveal a nonlinear impact of CEO optimism and narcissism on capital structure).