Is There a Connection Between CEOs' Narcissism and Corporate Tax-Dodging?

Over 20 years ago, Fortune 500 CEO Harold McInnes
saw the narcissism coming — into America’s executive
suites

By Sam Pizzigati
Narcissists don’t happen to be particularly nice people. They preen. They grab. And they never ever really feel our pain.

Narcissists, some fascinating new business school research reminds us, also don’t make for particularly effective corporate CEOs.

This new research — out of the University of Southern California and the University of Arizona — examines the impact of CEO narcissism on corporate tax policies. That impact turns out to be fairly robust. The corporations that America most narcissistic CEOs run seem to be prone to engaging in highly risky corporate tax-avoidance maneuvers.

How did the authors of this new research, Kari Joseph Olsen and James Stekelberg, identify the narcissists in America’s top CEO suites? They used a variety of yardsticks, everything from the pay gap between CEOs and their fellow execs to the prominence of CEO photos in corporate annual reports.

In the end, the two business school researchers had no problem finding a statistically significant subset of CEO narcissists within the Fortune 500. And that hefty number of narcissist CEOs begs a rather obvious question: Do narcissists just naturally gravitate to America’s corporate pay summit or do the incredibly cushy rewards at that summit turn otherwise normal people into narcissists?

Until fairly recently social scientists left that sort of question to philosophers. But recent years have brought a surge of research into the impact of affluence on behavior. Experiments and field observations have shown that upper-crust life may be breeding, as University of California-Berkeley psychologist Paul Piff puts it, “increased entitlement and narcissism.”

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