Adam Grant says remote-work resistance may reflect narcissistic bosses

Inc. published a piece on August 3 that linked bosses’ resistance to remote work with narcissism, a framing that lands especially hard at monday.com, where distributed work is part of the company’s own pitch. Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at The Wharton School and host of TED’s WorkLife podcast, sits behind the argument that office mandates can reflect psychology as much as operations. The line doing the most work in the discussion is blunt: “Across our studies of CEOs, executives, middle managers, and supervisors, the only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism.”

That claim has already traveled beyond the original article. Later coverage from ABC News on July 21 and a New York Times opinion item on June 22 repeated the same basic finding, and another summary of the research put it this way: “Narcissistic leaders resist remote work because it interferes with their motivations for power and status.” Grant had also been talking about the issue years earlier, in a Future Forum conversation posted Oct. 8, 2020, after a live session on leading teams in a remote work world. TED has said remote work became an overnight reality during the pandemic and that there is already a body of knowledge on how to do it well.

For monday.com employees, the distinction matters because the company has made flexible work part of its public identity. Its blog includes remote-management, hybrid-work and remote-collaboration material, and its remote-work partner page says, “Communicate and work remotely as a team.” The careers page lists Tel-Aviv, New York, Denver, Miami, San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, Austin, London and Sydney, underscoring that monday.com recruits across multiple hubs rather than one fixed campus. That matters inside a SaaS business where engineers, product managers and sales teams are often judged by shipped features, customer outcomes and quota, not by who sits in which chair.

Monday.com has also put numbers behind the debate. A Business Wire item on its State of Remote Work said 69% enjoyed working from home more than expected, 54% felt more productive at home than in the office and 17% worked with a pet or child. Great Place to Work says monday.com was updated in May 2022 and that 97% of employees say it is a great place to work. For managers, the practical test is straightforward: if an office push is tied to handoffs, customer coverage or measurable output, it can be defended as an operating choice; if it is mostly about visibility and control, employees are likely to read it as a power move rather than a performance policy.