Ms. Berg, you are an industrial engineer, a consultant for leadership development and, together with five other researchers, you have presented a study on narcissism in management floors entitled “The Young Bulls are Coming”.

That narcissists want to manipulate, scheme, shine and be celebrated by others has been well researched.

What else was there to explore?

Pure burger

Political correspondent in North Rhine-Westphalia.

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Originally we were interested in the topic of female empowerment.

If you research how it is possible to encourage women to catch up with men, even in management positions, you quickly come to the closely linked phenomenon of narcissism.

So far, there has not been a broad overview of narcissism in German companies and especially in management.

We deliberately focused on subclinical narcissism – unlike clinical narcissism, it is not yet pathological.

How many people took part in your representative survey?

Our study, published in Harvard Business Manager, is one of the largest single empirical studies on the subject.

From May to November 2020, we surveyed around 10,000 men and women in Germany across all age and hierarchy levels.

Of the 2,500 executives in it, 736 were board-level managers.

According to many previous studies, older men are considered to be particularly narcissistic.

Did you find that confirmed?

Only partially.

Because at first we were surprised that young men and women around the age of 30 in particular have the highest narcissistic values.

The expression decreases with advancing age.

However, if one differentiates between the levels of the company, one finds that narcissism also increases with increasing hierarchical levels - and here men in particular are conspicuous.

Is that because women are underrepresented in leadership positions?

Among the women in the top floors there are definitely very pronounced narcissistic managers.

But there are significantly more women who made it there with low narcissism scores.

Isn't narcissism even a prerequisite for making it to the top?

We know from the current literature that the likelihood of becoming a leader increases proportionally with the narcissism score.

The problem is that rising narcissism quickly becomes dysfunctional and gets in the way of good leadership.

Through the scheming, manipulative way, for example, team members are played off against each other.

It is often the best people who leave the company.

You measured shockingly high levels of narcissism in your own age group, the thirty-somethings.

Is there a narcissistic generation growing up?

You could say that.

Current studies from America also confirm this. All of this is reinforced by the ever-expanding rating mania in social media, the permanent self-portrayal and self-optimization.

What is to be done when dealing with what you call young bulls?

Society in general has to adjust to a very narcissistic generation. Companies in particular should reconsider their management concepts and promotion criteria and cultivate their corporate culture. As early as the selection process, more conscious attention should be paid to the character traits, values ​​or behavior of the applicants. In everyday work, continuous feedback is an important tool for unmasking the narcissist, for example, who is constantly adorning himself with someone else's feathers. Of course, even for narcissists, opportunities for change are only fair. It is very important to have healthy leadership role models by which we can orientate ourselves and grow.

Men and women who are shaped by the "dark triad" of personality traits - narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy - often succeed in their jobs despite social intolerance and make it to the executive floors. Doesn't that indicate that there is a lot going wrong in a corporate system that obviously encourages this?

A very important question.

Precisely because a generation of narcissists is growing up, companies should urgently define what kind of leadership they want to stand for.

Many still envision a successful corporate personality as a male-dominant alpha, loud, strong, risk-taking, and assertive.

This needs to be questioned urgently.

But in many companies, instead of empathy and commitment, individual competition and the pursuit of power are rewarded, paving the way for narcissists to rise to the top and even rewarding this behavior.

How Dangerous Can Narcissists in Pinstripes Be to Businesses?

Very dangerous, especially the higher the level and how much narcissistic behavior is encouraged.

The corporate culture can become toxic, bad decisions are made.

Because narcissists live in a constant ambivalence of the extremes between megalomania and a high degree of inferiority and want to maintain their inflated self-image at any price, when in doubt they decide in their favor and not in favor of the company or team.

You are currently writing your dissertation at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf.

About which topic?

I am currently investigating how harmful or perhaps helpful narcissism is for founders.

Don't you have to be a young bull to set up a start-up?

I can't reveal too much yet because the results haven't been published yet.

But it is very exciting to see how narcissism and the first success or perhaps failure of founders interact.