Must Modern Economies Nurture Narcissism?

[marmar]

from Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality:


Must Modern Economies Nurture Narcissism?
JULY 19, 2014

To really take on grandiosity and greed, a new report from a prestigious CEO pay watchdog suggests, we may need to shove onto the global political stage the notion of a maximum wage.

By Sam Pizzigati


Narcissists don’t happen to be particularly nice people. They preen. They grab. And they never ever really feel our pain.

Narcissists, some fascinating new business school research reminds us, also don’t make for particularly effective corporate CEOs.

This new research — out of the University of Southern California and the University of Arizona — examines the impact of CEO narcissism on corporate tax policies. That impact turns out to be fairly robust. The corporations that America most narcissistic CEOs run seem to be prone to engaging in highly risky corporate tax-avoidance maneuvers.

How did the authors of this new research, Kari Joseph Olsen and James Stekelberg, identify the narcissists in America’s top CEO suites? They used a variety of yardsticks, everything from the pay gap between CEOs and their fellow execs to the prominence of CEO photos in corporate annual reports.

In the end, the two business school researchers had no problem finding a statistically significant subset of CEO narcissists within the Fortune 500. And that hefty number of narcissist CEOs begs a rather obvious question: Do narcissists just naturally gravitate to America’s corporate pay summit or do the incredibly cushy rewards at that summit turn otherwise normal people into narcissists? .................(more)

- See more at: http://toomuchonline.org/must-modern-economies-nurture-narcissism/#sthash.hDZV5EuD.dpuf