What If Adam Grant Studied Return-to-Office Mandates? A Thought Experiment on Narcissism and Control

Imagine, for a moment, that organizational psychologist Adam Grant and his Wharton colleagues had spent six years examining why certain leaders became so fixated on forcing employees back to physical offices. Imagine they constructed narcissism scores for Fortune 500 CEOs using behavioral proxies pulled from public records: signature size in documents, photo prominence in annual reports, the pay gap between a CEO and their median employee. Imagine they found what their hypothesis suggested: the higher a leader's narcissistic traits, the more they resisted remote work.

This study does not exist. Not yet, anyway. But the question it would ask has become impossible to ignore.

The return-to-office mandate is not, on its surface, about ego. It is supposedly about productivity, collaboration, innovation—the vague synergies that fill executive emails with predictable regularity. Yet there is a striking disconnect between what leaders say and what evidence suggests. The justifications have calcified into routine. These mandates boost productivity. They enhance culture. They create serendipitous collisions of genius. The evidence for any of this is thin.

Studies on remote work productivity show mixed results at worst, positive results at best. Culture can be built across continents. Serendipity is a convenient myth for people who like being in rooms together.

What researchers have actually documented is this: prominent return-to-office advocates—Andy Jassy at Amazon, Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase, Adam Mosseri at Instagram, Larry Fink at BlackRock—have made mandates non-negotiable, threatened departures, and framed the office as a moral necessity. None of them have presented compelling productivity data to justify the mandate. What they have presented is insistence, repetition, and moral language about presence as commitment.

If Grant's hypothetical study were conducted, its logic would be straightforward. In an office, leaders can direct attention toward themselves through hand gestures, voice modulation, eye contact, and posture adjustment. Remote settings curtail these usual means of wielding dominance. A CEO is just a grid on a Zoom call, indistinguishable from a senior analyst. The leader cannot command the room if there is no room.

This is not proof of narcissism. It is a structural observation about power and visibility.

What is striking about this thought experiment is not that it reveals anything new about executive psychology—this is not news—but that it provides a plausible psychological framework for a phenomenon that has felt increasingly absurd to workers who have proven they can perform their jobs from anywhere. For years, remote workers have sensed the disconnect between the stated rationale for RTO mandates and the actual reason for them. The executive speech about culture and innovation has felt hollow because the justifications do not hold up under scrutiny.

The harder question for boards and shareholders is this: if a leader's resistance to remote work cannot be justified by evidence, what does that say about their decision-making on other matters where ego and evidence might diverge? A tendency toward status-seeking and control expressed through workplace policy is not a leadership virtue. It is a decision-making pattern worth examining.

The real study—the one that would examine narcissism, office mandates, and CEO psychology—has not been conducted. The Alignment Times could not verify that Grant, Shandell, and Elliott have published such research. But the fact that this study would be useful, that its findings would feel intuitive to workers across 30 economies, and that it would answer questions leaders have persistently refused to answer directly—that itself is the story.

Until such research exists, we are left with observable facts: leaders are insisting on office presence without productivity justification. Workers are resisting. Boards are largely silent. And the disconnect between stated reasons and plausible motivations grows wider each quarter.

Why wait for the study? The pattern is already visible. The only question is whether organizations will examine it honestly, or whether they will continue insisting that presence is productivity, that mandates are merit-based, and that the office is about anything other than what it has always been: a stage where power is most clearly seen.