Most employees prefer to receive workplace recognition and bonuses behind closed doors, yet individuals with more pronounced narcissistic traits show a much stronger appetite for public accolades and impressive job titles. New research published in Social Psychological and Personality Science suggests that this preference is tied to a strong desire for social status and a lack of worry about making coworkers envious. The findings indicate that common management tactics like handing out flashy job titles in place of raises may disproportionately appeal to more narcissistic workers.
In the workplace, managers frequently use rewards to recognize strong performance and keep staff motivated. These incentives generally fall into two categories: public rewards, such as an employee-of-the-month award or praise during a company-wide meeting, and private rewards, such as a quiet salary bump or a complimentary email from a supervisor. Choosing the right approach depends heavily on personality, particularly a trait psychologists call grandiose narcissism. Grandiose narcissism is a personality dimension characterized by an inflated sense of self-importance, feelings of entitlement, social dominance, and a belief that one is superior to others.
Past research indicates that people with elevated narcissistic traits often calibrate their effort based on how visible their success will be to an audience. For instance, a 2002 study found that individuals high in narcissism performed much better on challenging tasks when there was an opportunity to win admiration, compared with conditions offering little chance to stand out.
This selective effort stems from a deep craving for social status, defined as respect, admiration, and deference from peers. Supporting this connection, a 2018 study of community members and college students indicated that both the charming, self-promoting side of narcissism and its hostile, competitive side share a comparable desire for status, even though they pursue it through different strategies.
To explain how this drive operates in daily life, the authors of a 2019 theoretical review argued that people high in grandiose narcissism constantly scan their surroundings for opportunities to boost their rank, pursuing status either by showing off to win admiration or by putting others down to defeat rivals. Public workplace rewards offer an ideal stage for both strategies, making it obvious to everyone who won and who lost. By contrast, people with lower levels of narcissism often shy away from the spotlight because they worry about sparking envy, an uncomfortable emotion marked by resentment and feelings of inferiority that can lead jealous coworkers to undermine high performers.
Because narcissism is typically linked to lower empathy, study author Emily M. Zitek, an associate professor of organizational behavior at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, and her colleagues hypothesized that more narcissistic employees would be less deterred by peer envy. They expected these workers to be much more drawn to public rewards, including the workplace practice of handing out impressive-sounding job titles without added pay or authority, known as title inflation.
“We had two goals,” Zitek told PsyPost. “My colleagues and I do research on entitlement and narcissism in the workplace, so we wanted to continue to explore this topic. And then we were also interested in the phenomenon of title inflation in the workplace and whether inflated titles are indeed appealing. Therefore, we put these two ideas together.”
To test this idea across four main studies and three supplemental replications, with a combined final sample of 1,069 full-time U.S. employees in the main studies, the researchers recruited participants through the online platform CloudResearch Connect. All studies were preregistered with publicly posted materials, data, and code, and sensitivity power analyses showed that the observed effects in every study exceeded the minimum size the designs could reliably detect.
In the first study, 249 participants wrote down one public reward and one private reward actually offered at their jobs, rated how motivating they found each on a seven-point scale, and completed a 16-item questionnaire measuring grandiose narcissism. Overall, workers rated private rewards like raises and one-on-one praise as more motivating than public ones, with average scores of 5.63 versus 4.43 out of 7. While employees across the narcissism spectrum were equally motivated by private rewards, those with higher narcissism scores reported noticeably greater motivation to earn public rewards than their less narcissistic peers.
Because the real-world rewards listed in the first study differed in practical value, such as comparing a private pay raise to a public compliment, a second study held the reward itself constant. A group of 244 full-time employees evaluated seven specific workplace incentives, including a 10 percent year-end bonus, a promotion, and a fancy lunch, rating whether they preferred a private or public version of each on a scale from 1 (definitely private) to 7 (definitely public). As a group, participants leaned toward privacy, averaging 3.23 out of 7 across the seven scenarios, below the neutral midpoint of 4. Even so, higher narcissism scores consistently predicted a stronger preference for public recognition across six of the seven reward types.
In the third study, the authors examined why narcissism predicts a taste for public recognition by asking 294 employees to choose between a private or company-wide announcement for a 10 percent bonus. Participants then rated how much their choice was guided by a desire for social status among peers and a concern about making colleagues feel envious. While the sample as a whole strongly favored the private bonus announcement with an average score of 2.01 out of 7, more narcissistic workers were much more inclined toward the public announcement.
A mediation analysis, which tests whether a relationship can be accounted for by intervening factors, found that people higher in narcissism reported a stronger desire for status and less concern about triggering envy, and that both of these were in turn related to preferring the public bonus. The authors caution that this type of analysis cannot establish that status desire and envy concern are the actual reasons for the preference, and that other untested explanations remain possible. The scale measuring concern about coworker envy also had relatively low internal consistency, which the authors noted could have affected their statistical estimates. Two supplemental studies that varied the measures produced the same general pattern.
The fourth study pitted a visible marker of prestige directly against private financial gain by asking 282 participants to choose between two hypothetical job offers that both required harder work. One job offered a prestigious new title that friends and family would find impressive without increasing pay, while the other offered a higher salary that outsiders would not know about while keeping the old title. To rule out the possibility that people simply wanted more workplace authority, the researchers specified that both positions carried the exact same level of company power, influence, and number of direct reports. Participants also completed an expanded questionnaire that measured overall grandiose narcissism alongside its two distinct sub-traits: narcissistic admiration (self-promotion) and narcissistic rivalry (antagonism toward competitors).
Across the entire sample, workers overwhelmingly favored the higher-paying job over the impressive title, averaging 1.72 on a seven-point scale where 1 favored pay and 7 favored the title. Participants also expressed a much greater willingness to work harder for a pay raise alone (averaging 6.17 out of 7) than for a prestigious title alone (averaging 2.79 out of 7).
However, overall narcissism, as well as both its admiration and rivalry components, positively predicted a greater likelihood of accepting the prestigious title over higher pay and a greater willingness to work harder just for a title upgrade. Higher overall narcissism and rivalry scores were even slightly associated with a reduced willingness to work harder for a private pay increase, and a third supplemental study replicated this link between narcissism and title preference.
“Employees would rather be praised in a 1-on-1 meeting than in front of their colleagues,” Zitek explained. “Narcissists, however, like public rewards much better than non-narcissists do. They are willing to work harder just to get a title increase in a way that others are not. Thus, when a company offers a public award, they should be aware that it might be more appealing to people higher in narcissism and less appealing to people lower in narcissism.”
These results align with a longitudinal study of grandiose narcissism and social status, which found that the two reinforce each other over time. That study tracked general status motives rather than specific workplace incentives, but both indicate that a drive for social rank sits at the core of grandiose narcissism. The new findings also echo a study of public versus anonymous charitable acts, which found that people higher in narcissism are primarily motivated by visible recognition in front of an audience.
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider when interpreting these findings. Even among participants with relatively high narcissism scores, private rewards and higher pay appear to have remained more popular on an absolute basis than public praise or unpaid title changes; their preference for privacy and money was simply less pronounced than that of people lower in narcissism.
In addition, the questionnaires measured grandiose narcissism as a continuous personality trait found in the everyday workforce rather than diagnosing clinical narcissistic personality disorder. Because the studies relied on cross-sectional surveys and mostly hypothetical choices, the data cannot establish cause and effect, and how employees think they would react to a public award might differ from how they feel when actually receiving one on the job.
Cultural context may play a role as well, since all participants were full-time workers in the United States, and public rewards might be viewed differently in more collectivistic societies that emphasize modesty. In the future, longitudinal workplace studies could test whether offering public recognition actually improves real-world job performance among more narcissistic employees. The research was funded by Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and the authors declared no conflicts of interest.
“We think our research shows that title inflation probably isn’t the most effective strategy to attract or motivate employees since most people prefer private rewards over public rewards,” Zitek noted. “Instead, the practice of title inflation might primarily attract a disproportionate number of narcissists.”
“My collaborators and I will continue to study the effects of entitlement and narcissism in the workplace,” Zitek added. “Workers often complain about having to interact with narcissistic and entitled bosses, coworkers, and subordinates, and we want to be able to give recommendations for how to deal with these personalities in the workplace. There are both pros and cons of these personality characteristics that are important to study. In our current research, we found that narcissists might work harder than others when offered a public reward, for example.”
The study, “Inflated Titles, Inflated Egos: Narcissism Predicts the Desire for Public Rewards,” was authored by Emily M. Zitek, Verena Krause, and Alexander H. Jordan.