Why Some Managers Impose a Remote Work Ban – Despite Better Performance

Who works in the office is not automatically more productive. A study involving the Techniker Krankenkasse concluded that remote work makes employees about 20% more productive compared to working in the office. However, this only applies up to a remote work share of about 60%. According to the study, beyond that point, communication, which is essential for collaboration, suffers.

Companies that want to be as productive as possible should therefore create hybrid structures. Nevertheless, since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, many leaders are bringing their teams back to the office completely. Researchers from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania investigated this seemingly irrational decision in a study and discovered a surprising connection – narcissism.

Egos Stand in the Way of Flexibility

Adam Grant, a psychology professor at the Wharton School, along with doctoral students Marissa Shandell and Courtney Elliott, studied for six years why some managers support flexible work models while others reject them. The three-part study surveyed several hundred executives, many from Fortune 500 companies, and included a variety of personality traits.

When the researchers later asked participants about their attitudes toward remote work and hybrid working, the responses did not correlate with their trust in employees or their preference for social contact. The only personality trait that reliably predicted objections to remote work was narcissism.

In a guest article for the New York Times, they explain: The higher executives rated themselves, the more they aspired to power and status – and the stronger their support for returning to the office. Since the size of an ego cannot be directly measured, factors that have been identified in many previous studies as reliable indicators of narcissism were used, including salary.

The researchers found: The higher the scores of executives on this index, the more likely they were to seek power and status by taking the chairmanship of their own companies and joining the boards of other companies. According to the study, these were also the executives who made the most negative comments about remote and hybrid work in the first two years of the pandemic.

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Narcissism as a Critical Barrier

Remote work also hinders egocentric leaders from recognizing employee appreciation. In video conferences, they are just one tile among many, while they cannot access employees as directly with tools like Slack. This prevents them from feeling the same power and control as in the office. However, the data showed that narcissistic leaders generally have more difficulty with the idea that employees can independently decide where and how they work.

The researchers come to a clear conclusion. "Long before the pandemic, the possibility of working virtually contributed to motivating and retaining employees," the study states. Given that modern work models play a central role in attracting new talent, the pursuit of power and status by narcissistic leaders poses a significant obstacle for companies and could become an enemy of flexibility.

This article was originally published on June 25, 2026, but it still interests many of our readers. Therefore, we have updated it and made it available again.