TL;DR: A new Wharton study finds that the more narcissistic a leader is, the more they resist remote work – for power and status, not productivity. It’s a sharp finding, but it shouldn’t become a stick to beat every manager with. Most managers resisting remote work aren’t narcissists protecting a fiefdom; they’re capable people whose entire craft was built on being able to see their team. Remote Work Europe has watched this play out for years, and the honest answer isn’t to force people back – it’s to change what management means.

Every few weeks another return-to-office memo does the rounds on LinkedIn, and within hours the comment threads sort themselves into two camps: the workers who feel betrayed, and the managers cast as the people who betrayed them. I’ve watched this cycle repeat since long before 2020, and it’s hardened into something joyless – a fight where nobody’s really listening, and where the manager is almost always the one in the firing line.

So I read the new Wharton paper with a certain grim recognition. Marissa Shandell, Courtney Elliott, and Adam Grant published “Worship me at the office altar: Why narcissistic leaders resist remote work” in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes this year, and the title alone tells you where the sympathy lies. Across three studies – an archival analysis of 259 Fortune 500 CEOs, a preregistered survey of 359 leaders, and an experiment with 546 more – they found that the more narcissistic a leader is, the more they resist remote work, and that the resistance is driven by motives for power and status rather than by productivity or culture. The effect held even after the researchers controlled for trust, the Big Five personality traits, and the other two Dark Triad traits.

It’s a genuinely good piece of research, and I’d point you to the paper itself rather than the headlines about it. But notice what it does and doesn’t say. It’s about narcissistic leaders – the ones for whom the office really is an altar and the team a congregation. That’s a real and corrosive type, and if your chief executive is demanding five days a week because the open-plan floor is where he feels most admired, this study names the problem with some precision.

What it doesn’t say is the conclusion half the internet reached within a day: that every manager reluctant to let go of the office is a small-time narcissist guarding his patch. Most of them aren’t. Most of them are disoriented, which is a different problem, and one with a far better solution than contempt.

What remote work took away from managers

Remote work dismantled the single instrument most managers were trained to rely on, which is presence. For decades, being able to see your team wasn’t one management technique among many; it was the technique, the substrate everything else sat on top of.

There’s even a name for it. “Management by walking around” was coined at Hewlett-Packard and popularised by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman in In Search of Excellence back in 1982, and it described something managers had been doing intuitively for generations: you wander the floor, you read the room, you catch the person who looks stuck before they say a word, you pick up the mood in the corridor and the thing that isn’t in anyone’s report. A skilled manager could walk through a department and know, almost by feel, where the work was flowing and where it wasn’t. That was real competence. It took years to build.

Then it stopped working. Take away the corridor, the drop-by, and the ability to glance across a room, and a whole craft evaporates overnight – not because the manager got worse, but because the conditions the craft depended on disappeared.

The managers I talk to about this rarely sound like tyrants. They sound lost. They spent careers becoming fluent in a way of leading that remote work renders mute, and being told they’re simply obsolete, or worse, insecure, doesn’t help any of us.

The managers who had never managed out of sight

Here’s the part the pile-on forgets: until March 2020, an enormous share of experienced, capable managers had never once managed a person they couldn’t see. Not for a day. Their entire professional lives had been co-located, and it had worked perfectly well.

Then the pandemic threw them into distributed leadership overnight, with no training, no handover, and no runway – mid-crisis, often with their own children at the kitchen table and the whole company lurching between panic and improvisation. Nobody sat them down and taught them how to lead people through a screen; they were expected to already know, on a Tuesday, a thing that takes real practice to learn. Some rose to it and never looked back. Plenty didn’t, and have spent the years since half-aware that they’re worse at their jobs than they used to be, without quite being able to say why. That deserves compassion rather than a dunk, and it’s worth remembering that the case for synchronous, real-time interaction in remote teams exists precisely because getting distributed leadership right is genuinely hard, not because anyone’s failing on purpose.

When performance data stops flowing through the manager

Done properly, remote work runs on real collaboration and on measuring value, with the performance data populating itself digitally as the work happens – and that removes something managers used to own outright, which is the flow of information.

For most of the history of management, the manager was the information-gatherer and the relay. Who’s working hard, who’s stuck, what’s the status, is the project on track – the manager collected all of it by being present, synthesised it, and passed it upward. That role was a genuine source of value, and also of power, because everything the organisation knew about the team ran through one person. In a well-run remote setup, the picture assembles itself: the board shows what’s shipped, the pipeline shows what’s moving, the value delivered is legible to anyone who cares to look, and clear communication protocols carry the context that used to live in the manager’s head. When the information flows automatically instead of through a person, the manager-as-conduit stops being necessary. And for some managers, the threat that bites hardest has nothing to do with the team slacking off out of sight. It’s the sight of their own indispensability dissolving, with nothing yet to put in its place.

Forcing people back won’t rescue an obsolete model

None of that, though, makes dragging everyone back into a building the right answer. Forcing bodies into chairs to rescue a model that stopped working treats the symptom and ignores the cause: the problem was never that people were out of sight, it was that a whole definition of the job had been built on being able to see them.

A chair occupied from nine to five tells you nothing about what was actually delivered from it. Presence was only ever a proxy – a rough, convenient stand-in for the things we really care about, which are effort, quality, and value. Remote work, at its best, strips the proxy away and makes us measure the real thing directly. That’s uncomfortable, because measuring outputs honestly is harder than counting who’s in the room, but it’s also more truthful, and a return-to-office mandate is often just a way of avoiding that harder measurement for another year.

From supervisor to practitioner: the harder, better job

Which is why I think the job itself has to change. If a manager can no longer add value by gathering information and being seen to gather it, then they have to add value some other way, and the obvious one is by doing work that moves the numbers. The manager becomes a practitioner: someone who delivers measurable value to the bottom line, not merely someone who supervises the people who do.

That’s a harder job, and a better one. It points towards flatter organisations, fewer layers whose only function is relaying status upward, and leadership judged on output rather than oversight. What does output-based leadership actually mean? It means a leader is accountable for results they help produce, not for the visible busyness of the people beneath them – you measure what a team ships and the value it creates, and you expect the person leading it to have their own hands in that work. Plenty of the best remote leaders I know already operate this way, and they tend to find it more satisfying, not less, because it’s real. The layer of management whose entire value was presence is the layer that remote work exposes; the layer that does the work survives it comfortably.

Where a disoriented manager can actually start

If you recognise yourself anywhere in this – a good manager who feels off-balance rather than a villain who deserves the pile-on – the constructive answer already exists, and it isn’t a mandate. It’s learning the craft that co-located leadership never asked you to.

Writing this piece sent me back to why I wrote my own book in the first place. It grew out of a competency framework I’d built for remote management – not for job seekers, but for exactly these managers, the ones who can lead brilliantly in a room and feel unmoored the moment the room disappears. I wrote it because I kept meeting capable people who’d been set up to fail by a shift nobody trained them for, and who needed a structure to relearn the job rather than a lecture about their character.

Remote Readiness – A Practical Framework for Leading Distributed Teams

Maya’s practical guide for managers taking a team remote, or making an existing distributed team work properly – built for the capable leaders that co-located management never prepared for this.

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The return-to-office fight will keep flaring, and there will always be a few leaders for whom the office really is an altar. But if you’re a manager reading this and feeling got at, you’re probably not one of them. You’re someone whose craft changed under you, and the work now is to build a new one. That’s within reach, and it’s worth doing.

FAQ

Does the Wharton study prove managers who want people back in the office are narcissists? No. Shandell, Elliott, and Grant (2026) found that leaders who score higher on narcissism resist remote work more, driven by motives for power and status. It identifies a real pattern among narcissistic leaders specifically; it does not show that every manager preferring the office is narcissistic. Most aren’t.

Why do so many managers genuinely struggle with remote work? Because until 2020 a large share of experienced managers had never managed anyone out of their line of sight, and much of their skill rested on presence – reading the room, catching problems in the corridor, “management by walking around”. Remote work removes those conditions, so a real competence stops working, usually with no training offered to replace it.

Isn’t forcing people back to the office a reasonable fix? It rescues an obsolete model rather than the actual goal. Presence is only a proxy for effort, quality, and value; a filled chair tells you nothing about what was delivered. Done well, remote work measures outputs and value directly, which is harder to do but far more honest than counting attendance.

What does good remote management look like instead? Managers becoming practitioners – people who deliver measurable value themselves, not only supervise those who do. That points towards flatter hierarchies and output-based leadership, where leaders are judged on results they help produce rather than on the visible busyness of their teams.

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