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As more employees are being ordered back into the office full time, new research suggests the rationale may be more about bosses’ desire for power and status than productivity.
A paper published this month from researchers at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania argues that leaders who display stronger narcissistic qualities are more likely to dislike remote work.
The researchers took a multipronged approach to examine why some leaders resist remote work while others support it.
It included reviewing public company reports for indicators of narcissism in CEOs, their public comments on remote work, personality surveys and an online experiment that tested the relationship between resistance to remote work and leaders’ desire for power and status.
Across their research, authors of the paper say leaders’ narcissism was associated with greater resistance to remote work.
“These results underscore that resistance to remote work has social as well as individual roots,” says the paper. “Our research accentuates that opposition to virtual work arrangements is more self-centered than previous research has recognized.”
The researchers hypothesize that narcissists’ desire for attention, affirmation and control makes them more likely to favour in-person work because it “offers richer channels for controlling and commanding reverence from employees.”
Remote work deprives leaders with narcissistic qualities of forms of control, they say.
“For example, they are not in a position to manage by walking around or summon employees to a conference room to issue commands,” they write.
WATCH | Survey says most workers like remote work:
Most people want to work remotely — companies want them back in-office
A recent Angus Reid survey suggests the majority of workers would prefer a fully remote or hybrid workplace, but many employers are opting to have employees in the office more often.
Sylvia Fuller, a labour markets expert and sociology professor at the University of British Columbia, said the new research highlights that employers may have personal reasons for wanting their workers back in the office five days a week, beyond the good of their organization.
“We tend to really look at employees and think employees have the personal motivations of wanting better work-life balance or wanting shorter commutes and so forth,” she said.
“And what [the research] really highlights is that leaders are also, to some extent, potentially motivated by these interpersonal or personal kinds of motivations, and that this might help explain why we’re seeing this kind of push towards forcing employees back to the office.”
Fuller said she doesn’t see a compelling argument for having employees return to the office full time, based on existing research.
According to Statistics Canada labour force survey data, labour productivity across all industries increased by 3.7 per cent between 2019 and 2021 — a time when the number of people working from home dramatically increased because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
At the same time, Statistics Canada’s 2022 Time Use Survey found no difference in the amount of time spent on paid work between those who worked in an office and those who teleworked from home.
Connection suffers with remote work: HR consultant
But Cissy Pau, a Vancouver-based HR consultant, said the employers she works with have many valid reasons for wanting their workers back in the office that go beyond productivity and control.
“It’s more for collaboration, or really, they are finding that employees are not connected in the same way that they used to be,” she said.
That’s partly because communication is just not as easy when people aren’t there in person, she added.
“Not that it doesn’t happen at all, but you can’t just walk to someone’s desk or, like, put your head over the cubicle and say something to the other person,” she said.
“You need to schedule a time, you need to book a video call. And so it’s just not as smooth and simple.”
The feeling of community is also just not the same, she said.
“So, [employers] want people to come back together on a more regular basis, so you get to know each other as individuals, as human beings. You get to interact and just not be this faceless person on the other side of the keyboard.”