Everyone Is Narcissistic Today

Self-value helps us survive, but when self-respect becomes self-worship, power begins to consume the person who seeks it.

Everyone is narcissistic today. Not clinically, of course. Most people do not have Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and a manager cannot be diagnosed from one meeting, one unpleasant decision, or a self-congratulatory LinkedIn post. Still, the sentence feels familiar because many workplaces reward the performance of certainty. People learn to speak up quickly, claim credit before somebody else does, and make their value visible. A quiet contribution can vanish; an admission of doubt can become evidence against you. Some of that is ordinary self-protection. Damage begins when a person trained to defend their status is also given the power to set everyone else's deadline.

Imagine a manager ending a Friday meeting with, I need this on Monday. Pressure may be coming from above: a director wants a number, a client is unhappy, or the team has already fallen behind. For the manager, that pressure is a problem to pass along. For the person doing the work, it is a cancelled plan, a missed dinner, or a partner asking why they are still answering messages. Nobody has to shout for the harm to be real. A private fear has become an urgent instruction, and somebody else's life is what absorbs it.

Power Is Made Personal

In a new team, the person who speaks first and sounds certain can quickly become the person everyone looks to. Research supports that impression: people with higher narcissism scores are more likely to emerge as leaders, even when nobody formally appoints them.¹ A meta-analysis found a similar gap between appearing to lead and leading effectively. Narcissism was associated with leadership emergence, not with observer-rated effectiveness, while self-ratings were more favorable.²

In everyday work, that gap becomes visible slowly. Someone makes a strong first impression, talks as if every answer is obvious, and takes control of the room. Months later, questions feel dangerous, bad news is passed over, and credit keeps travelling upward. Confidence remains on display, but trust has already begun to drain away.

Confidence, ambition, and pride are not problems by themselves. In my view, the useful boundary is whether a person can remain effective after being corrected. A leader can say, “I missed that,” without losing their authority. A leader who treats every correction as disrespect will eventually surround themselves with people who agree quickly and think quietly.

Power can become part of a person's identity without them noticing. Promotions that once meant more responsibility start to feel like proof of superiority. Another person's better idea feels like a challenge. Questions about the plan sound like attacks.

Failure exposes the difference. A healthy manager can say, “I made the call. I missed something. Let's fix it.” Someone focused on preserving an image of competence may reach for a scapegoat: the employee who raised the concern, the team that misunderstood the instructions, or the person who was not enthusiastic enough. Facts become props. What matters is who will still look competent when the meeting ends.

Power also changes how much resistance a person encounters. In practice, that can look like a manager who assumes silence means agreement, or who sees a tired employee as uncommitted rather than exhausted. At higher levels, a quiet room is easily mistaken for a convinced room, even when people are simply afraid to speak.

Research on power suggests that people in powerful positions may evaluate others by how useful they are to a current goal.³ In a spreadsheet, a person can be reduced to a headcount. In a meeting, they can become the person expected to deliver by Friday. Illness, family, and everything outside the task can disappear from the decision. Power does not affect everyone in the same way. One study found that it amplified existing moral tendencies: people with a strong moral identity became less self-interested, while people with a weaker moral identity became more so.⁴

At work, this damage becomes visible. Research has linked narcissistic leadership with lower psychological safety, weaker collaboration, and poorer information exchange.⁵, ⁶ When a manager reacts badly whenever someone raises a problem, people stop bringing problems. They wait for the deadline to pass, then quietly tell one another what they saw coming weeks earlier.

Soon silence becomes part of the job. New employees learn not to correct the manager in public. Colleagues soften bad news until it is no longer useful. People praise decisions they expect to fail because they have seen what happens to the last person who disagreed. A leader may leave eventually, but the habits remain: keep your head down, protect yourself, and never be first to say the plan is wrong.

Pushback Is Discouraged

Calling someone a narcissist can feel satisfying after a difficult meeting. It can also end the conversation too quickly. I care less about the label than the pattern that follows it. What does the person do when the room stops agreeing with them?

Picture a performance review after a deadline has already been missed. During the review, an employee explains that Monday was unrealistic and reminds the manager that they raised the concern earlier. A constructive response would examine the estimate, the workload, and what should change next time. Instead, the manager replies, “I need people who are committed,” or, “This is why I cannot delegate.” A scheduling problem has been turned into a character judgment.

This is the boundary I would not dismiss as a personality difference: people must be able to describe a risk without being punished for raising it. A manager can reject the warning. They cannot fairly turn it into evidence that the employee is lazy, negative, or not loyal enough. Once that happens, honesty becomes a liability.

After a failed project, the same pattern appears. A manager approves the plan, ignores an earlier concern, and later asks who made the mistake. Maybe the employee made a mistake. Maybe the plan was flawed. If the team knows an honest answer will damage somebody's standing, the official explanation will blame poor execution. Next time, the same weakness survives into the plan, while fewer people are willing to point it out.

Other signs are quieter but just as revealing. Credit is taken for somebody else's idea. Questions get interrupted, and later people are blamed for not taking initiative. Openness is requested, but private feedback is answered with a colder schedule or a worse assignment. An apology arrives only after someone senior notices the problem. None of these moments proves a diagnosis. Together, they teach the team what is safe to say.

Power is not automatically harmful. Someone still has to set priorities, make a difficult call, correct poor work, or protect a team from unreasonable demands. Boundaries do not mean that every decision must be negotiated forever. Authority should stay connected to the work. Managers can say no without humiliating someone. They can correct poor work without attacking the worker's character. They can change plans without pretending the new idea was theirs all along.

In my view, authority remains legitimate only when correction is still possible. Plans can change without a scapegoat. Criticism can be heard without prompting a search for enemies. Credit can be given without treating another person's success as a loss. Most importantly, people affected by a decision must be able to say, “This will not work,” without putting their job or dignity at risk.

Research on self-regard offers one useful explanation for why rank can feel so personal. Self-esteem responds to both belonging and status, while narcissism is more tightly tied to status.⁷ When a person's self-evaluation depends heavily on rank, another person's success may feel like a loss. They may take back the credit, find a flaw, or remind the room who has the title.

Consequences Are Carried by Others

This does not mean every confident person is dangerous. A role is revealed by what it permits once resistance disappears. With fewer consequences, some people become more generous and decisive. Others avoid correction, act on resentment, and turn an ordinary disagreement into a contest they must win.

Two managers may reject the same proposal. One explains the reason, listens to the response, and accepts responsibility if the decision fails. Another mocks the person who proposed it and later claims the idea was never serious. Both used authority. Only one made the room safer for the next person who has to speak.

Nearly everyone wants to be seen, respected, and significant. Trouble begins when those ordinary wants require another person's input to be ignored, discounted, or punished. A higher position can widen what we are able to do. It does not make our judgment infallible, and it does not make other people's fear, exhaustion, or dignity irrelevant.

More useful than asking Who is the narcissist? is asking this: when power removes the need to ask for permission, what behavior does it make easier?

A manager's insecurity can become a deadline. A leader's defensiveness can make bad news dangerous to share. Titles explain who gets to make decisions. They cannot prove that those decisions are sound, or that the people making them can bear to hear they are wrong.

Amy B. Brunell et al., “Leader Emergence: The Case of the Narcissistic Leader,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34, no. 12 (2008): 1663–1676. DOI.↩︎
Emily Grijalva et al., “Narcissism and Leadership: A Meta-Analytic Review of Linear and Nonlinear Relationships,” Personnel Psychology 68, no. 1 (2015): 1–47. DOI and abstract.↩︎
Deborah H. Gruenfeld et al., “Power and the Objectification of Social Targets,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 95, no. 1 (2008): 111–127. DOI record.↩︎
Katherine A. DeCelles, D. Scott DeRue, Joshua D. Margolis, and Tara L. Ceranic, “Does Power Corrupt or Enable? When and Why Power Facilitates Self-Interested Behavior,” Journal of Applied Psychology 97, no. 3 (2012): 681–689. DOI.↩︎
Charles A. O'Reilly III, Bernadette Doerr, and Angela Hua, “Toxic Cultures: How Narcissistic Leaders Undermine Psychological Safety,” Current Psychology 43, no. 45 (2024): 34778–34791. DOI.↩︎
Barbara Nevicka et al., “Reality at Odds with Perceptions: Narcissistic Leaders and Group Performance,” Psychological Science 22, no. 10 (2011): 1259–1264. DOI.↩︎
Nikhila Mahadevan, Aiden P. Gregg, and Constantine Sedikides, “Is Self-Regard a Sociometer or a Hierometer? Self-Esteem Tracks Status and Inclusion, Narcissism Tracks Status,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 116, no. 3 (2019): 444–466. DOI.↩︎