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Laura Silverman: Emily Grijalva got an early lesson in empathy from her mother, who believed that everyone deserves understanding—even bullies.

Emily Grijalva: I was bullied pretty fiercely as a child, and my mom would always tell me to think about what the other person might be feeling.

Laura Silverman: Today, she evinces that empathy as a pioneering researcher on narcissism, a personality trait that is generally associated with toxic behavior, but, as Grijalva has learned over years of research, is more complicated than people think. An associate professor of organizational behavior at the University at Buffalo's School of Management, Grijalva has published dozens of papers looking at narcissism from a variety of perspectives. Several of her articles have been among the most read or cited in their respective journals, and her research has been covered in major media outlets, including Time, The Washington Post, CNN, the Huffington Post and MTV News.

Welcome to Driven to Discover, a University at Buffalo podcast that explores what inspires today's innovators. My name is Laura Silverman, and on this episode, I'll be talking to Emily Grijalva about narcissism in the workplace, how it connects to gender, and how it changes over time.

Dr. Grijalva, this is an unusual topic to study. How, and when, did you first become interested in narcissism?

Emily Grijalva: I was always interested in personality psychology because I found it really interesting how people are similar to one another, how they differ. Is it nature? Is it nurture? Why do people become egotistical and selfish? But I didn't throughout my childhood think, ‘I'm going to grow up and study narcissism.’ It was more an interest in psychology and human behavior. And then when I was in my PhD program, I was lucky enough to work with a very famous personality psychologist, Brent Roberts. I took his first seminar, my first seminar in the PhD program, about that topic, about personality development. He introduced me to narcissism, and it's stuck ever since, because it's such a fascinating topic.

The behavior of narcissists is interesting because it's so contradictory. On one hand, they really want to be admired; that's a fundamental drive for them in life. But at the same time, they're so antagonistic. They can be arrogant, entitled, manipulative, exploitative, basically driving people away in the long term. How does that behavior match with this underlying goal? Basically, it seems very counterintuitive in terms of the behavior itself. And I think that the counterintuitiveness of narcissism, trying to understand what they're thinking and why they would do these things, is what has kept me hooked on this topic over time.

Laura Silverman: A lot of people throw that word narcissism around rather freely, without understanding how complicated the trait is.

Emily Grijalva: Yes. Narcissism is a very complicated trait with a lot of baggage, and so I'm going to try and break down some of the complexity of what's going on with this trait. One of the complications here is that you can talk about narcissism as a personality trait or as a clinical disorder. There's actually a narcissistic personality disorder that could be diagnosed if you go to therapy and talk to a clinician. And I study narcissism from the perspective of a personality trait; it's on a spectrum from low to high levels. You could be anywhere in that spectrum. Clinical diagnoses also acknowledge you could have differing levels, but they primarily look at people with extremely high levels.

In terms of the other complexity here, there are also different ways to manifest narcissism itself, and this is complicated because from the perspective of people who are non-experts, lay people, we tend to think of narcissists as being brash and bold, self-confident and outgoing. And that is one subtype of narcissism, which we call grandiose narcissists. These would be famous figures like Tony Stark from the Marvel universe, that kind of really exaggerated egotistical self-confidence.

But there's also another type that clinical psychologists see more frequently, actually, because these are individuals who share the self-interested core, where they have this inflated sense of self-importance and entitlement, but they also tend to suffer more from negative affect, being hypersensitive to criticism and experiencing more shame. These are people who are more neurotic, they're more unhappy with their lives, and they're also more introverted. This vulnerable type of narcissism is something that we've only begun to study within, really, the last decade. That's really an upcoming area to see how these two types differ. Most of the research I'm going to talk about today is about the grandiose type of narcissism.

Laura Silverman: A lot of your work focuses on the workplace, in particular on leadership. Can you tell us the connection between the trait and leadership?

Emily Grijalva: Yes. Probably one of my most cited studies is looking at a meta-analysis of the relationship between narcissism and leadership. And a meta-analysis is a fancy term for aggregating all the available data on a topic. We found that narcissists, probably unsurprisingly, are more likely to emerge into leadership positions, which means that they're more likely to be seen as leader-like. And this is, as I was saying, maybe unsurprising, because they have some characteristics that we prototypically associate with leaders. For example, self-confidence. They also self-nominate because they want power and control. And for that reason, a lot of people don't want to be leaders, so they're like, ‘Sure, you can lead.’ And so they make their way into leadership positions more frequently.

But then the question becomes, are they good leaders? And this is where it gets interesting. I originally hypothesized, of course they'd be bad leaders. They tend to be abusive, they are self-centered, people would realize that they're like this and they wouldn't want to work with them. But instead, we found that there was no relationship between narcissism and leadership effectiveness. And this was pretty shocking. It was approximately 26 different studies, 4000 participants. It's a big sample of people, and the relationship was near zero. This means some narcissists are good leaders, some are bad leaders, but there's no overall pattern. Which was fascinating but also heartbreaking, because this was my dissertation and I thought I wouldn't get a job.

Laura Silverman: Oh, wow.

Emily Grijalva: Finding null results is not really a great way to get your stuff published. So we did a follow-up study. We tried to dig more into this and really figure out what's going on. We realized that the relationship between narcissism and leader effectiveness is curvilinear. It's an inverted U shape, which means that moderate levels of narcissism are ideal, but really low levels, theoretically, could lead to insecure, hesitant leaders. There’s someone we wouldn't have confidence could lead and make the hard decisions. And then very high levels, again, could, that could lead to the arrogant, more tyrannical leader that could be dysfunctional. And this is interesting because it suggests everything in moderation, and really highlights that narcissism isn't all bad.

Laura Silverman: Is there a way for organizations to harness the good parts of a narcissistic leader while mitigating the bad?

Emily Grijalva: Honestly, there's not a lot of research on this yet. And, theoretically, these are some of the ideas that people have thrown out. They have suggested there might be some situations that narcissists would be more beneficial, and these would be times when there's an organizational crisis, there's a need for a dramatic change. That's when narcissists' tendencies to take risks, have a compelling vision of the future, their self-confidence, those would be more appealing and comforting to employees who are going through a difficult time. At the same time, you don't want to let a tyrannical person into an organization, because then, of course, they could engage in more negative behaviors. And then people have suggested you need to set clear boundaries and expectations, particularly around ethical norms and norms around how you're expected to interact with your employees and direct reports.

Laura Silverman: What would you say to those people who are working under a narcissistic leader? Do you have any advice for them?

Emily Grijalva: If the leader is abusive, then I definitely recommend trying to find a new job. That isn't always possible for people—I understand that. And so then you have to think about how to best manage the situation, and one of the most important things is figuring out how to set boundaries with that person.

One of my co-workers had a really difficult situation where she was a junior scholar and she was working on a research project with a more senior scholar who is well known in the field. And the project they were working on became extremely toxic. One of her first steps was to implement some boundaries. She was lucky, in this case, that it was a remote relationship. She started to try to only have email communication, because this is an individual who was calling her in the middle of the night, who was berating her in their zoom meetings in which there was another colleague, insulting her, yelling.

Then the next step that people recommend is to really start documenting what's happening in case there are later misunderstandings with that person, and it can get to a point where you really need to elevate it to someone else in the organization. And that's, in fact, what she had to do. She went to the journal and she said, ‘This is what's going on. Can you help me with this situation?’ They helped her to expedite the process so that the paper could get accepted more quickly, and she didn't have to interact as much with this person anymore. That was the best-case outcome.

And then, of course, another thing that I highly recommend is getting social support, whether that's a therapist, a friend, making sure that you're really taking care of yourself and getting outside perspectives on how to respond to the situation.

Laura Silverman: So, we talked earlier, and you said something I found really compelling. You said that sometimes the person accusing someone else of being a narcissist is the actual narcissist. Is there generally not a lot of self-awareness when it comes to this trait?

Emily Grijalva: I would say, definitionally, narcissists have low self-awareness. But this is complicated. By that, I mean they really are self-confident. They think they are extremely good at many things, they don't have any flaws. They don't have an accurate sense of strengths and weaknesses. But at the same time, it's interesting, because researchers show that they do tend to realize other people see them as narcissistic. But they believe that their narcissistic qualities are adaptive. So if you ask them, are these qualities, you know, beneficial, they would say, yes, they help them be more competitive and more productive compared to other people. And this is one of the challenges with narcissists, and a reason why they would not be as amenable to changing their qualities, because they don't see them necessarily as a downside.

Laura Silverman: You've also looked at gender. You did a large meta-analysis, again, in which you found that narcissism is more prevalent among men than women, which is not especially surprising. But you also looked at whether changing gender roles over time had any effect on that ratio, and you found that they didn't, which is kind of surprising. So my question is, are men just more narcissistic by nature, or does nurture have any role in this?

Emily Grijalva: As a personality psychologist, I would always say that nature and nurture influence people's personality traits, but that I was also surprised by the fact there wasn't a decrease in that gender difference in narcissism over time. And that's because we think that a lot of gender differences are driven by social roles. So we see someone engaging in a social role, and then we … for example, traditionally, men worked more outside the home, and women were caregivers, taking care of children. And then we assumed that, okay, women are more nurturing and kind and caring, and men are more agentic. They—

Laura Silverman: More what?

Emily Grijalva: Agentic. Socially dominant. So when we talk about these really stereotypical gender differences, we call them agency and communion. And the interesting thing is that over time, women have started to increase in agency, but the levels of communion have remained more stable, and our expectations of women, we still assume and prescriptively want them to be more communal, meaning more nurturing and kind. And that is at odds with narcissism, where it's more antagonistic.

When I was looking at these results, I was assuming it was driven by the fact that most societies still find it very off-putting for women to engage in arrogance or any of those behaviors, because they conflict with our view of them as these more communal individuals.

Laura Silverman: Another area of study for you has been narcissism over the life cycle. We tend to think of the trait as static, but you found that it mellows over time. Why do you think that is?

Emily Grijalva: One explanation for why narcissism might decrease over time is referred to as the social investment theory, and this means that narcissists are engaging in roles such as being a caretaker or working full time to support themselves, having to get along with others at work. And it's through engaging in those types of roles that generally we, our personality, becomes more mature over time. For example, people will tend to become more conscientious and more emotionally stable, and their narcissism decreases.

Another theory is referred to as the reality principal model. And this is the idea that as we get older, we have more opportunities to experience failure. For example, not getting into our dream college, not getting that first job that we really want. And the accumulation of these more external reminders of our own fallibility also can help to decrease narcissism over time. Which is a really interesting idea, although it hasn’t been tested.

Laura Silverman: So that kind of ties into this idea, we talked about this earlier as well, that, you know, every generation thinks that the children of that generation are way more entitled and selfish than, you know, we ever were. But it sounds like perhaps that's not what is going on there.

Emily Grijalva: I think it's a really tempting thing to believe. But when you look at all the data—and the way we did this is we gathered data from undergraduate students, thousands and thousands of undergraduate students, who all filled out a survey at approximately the same age, over 30 years. And this is more than 20,000 people. We were looking at whether the narcissism levels increased. It turns out that with all the data combined, we find it didn't increase.

But another reason people might think that young people are narcissistic is because they actually are more narcissistic than their elders, as we were talking about. Because narcissism decreases over time, when we get older, it's easy for us to look back and forget that we were also more narcissistic when we were young. The people around us at that age were more narcissistic, and it is a normal thing for young people to be more narcissistic. This is the way it's pretty much always been.

Laura Silverman: Okay, so one final question. You did a study about the NBA, the National Basketball Association, and how narcissism can affect the outcome of games. What did you learn from that study?

Emily Grijalva: The cool thing about this is we were using NBA teams, but we really wanted this to apply to any kind of action-based team that would be similar. And we thought basketball teams were great because they have to coordinate a lot. They're highly interdependent. The complication here is that we couldn't just go out and give the NBA players a survey of their narcissism, and we had to be creative about how we measure narcissism for that reason. We decided a really good measure that's been shown by past research to capture narcissism is how someone engages with Twitter. So we hired a small team of MBA students, and they helped us code almost 35,000 tweets for whether or not they were narcissistic, and then we looked at how that affected the team.

We found that teams that had higher average or mean levels of narcissism weren't able to accomplish coordination gains over the course of the season. So they may start out relatively similar to the teams that were lower in narcissism, but the problem was that they couldn't start to gel together over the course of the season. We also found that same thing for if you had higher-level narcissists in core roles on a team; in this case, the point guard, that was particularly problematic. And then if you had a strong outlier, a strong maximum level of narcissism on the team, that was bad at the beginning and the end, it didn't matter. It didn't take time for that negative effect to show.

This overall really was interesting to me, because a problem I've been facing is that narcissism at an individual level isn't related to job performance. Some people are good performers, some are bad performers. I could see a leader who is just focused on the bottom line thinking, ‘Okay, well then I'm gonna hire this star performer. It doesn't matter if they're a narcissist. It won't detract from their performance.’ The piece they’re missing is that it can detract from other people's performance. It can detract from a team's performance, the ability to work together. And that's where narcissism in organizations becomes really toxic.

Laura Silverman: Well thank you so much, Dr Grijalva. This has been a really interesting conversation.

Emily Grijalva: Thank you for having me. It was really a pleasure to get to talk about something I'm so passionate and interested in.