Abstract
Widespread attention is being paid to the alleged rise of narcissism in people in general and business leaders in particular. Surprisingly, hardly any studies have focused on the link between narcissism and entrepreneurship. Using self-reported data from 4798 respondents from three countries, we explore the associations between trait narcissism and six different entrepreneurial aspects that represent the entire entrepreneurial process. Overall, our findings suggest that a positive link exists between narcissism and entrepreneurship that is particularly salient in the early stage of the entrepreneurial process (e.g., entrepreneurial intention) and in the individual aspects of entrepreneurship (e.g., entrepreneurial orientation, well-being of the entrepreneur). Our additional analyses reveal that the adaptive aspect of narcissism (i.e., leadership/authority) is most consistently linked to entrepreneurship and that the links between narcissism and entrepreneurship are predominately linear. Finally, our findings are largely robust when different sets of controls are added.
Highlights
In the past decades, narcissism, a label that originates from the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own image, has seen an upsurge in both public and scholarly interest
The primary objective of the present study was to provide an empirical account of the alleged link between narcissism and entrepreneurship
Our findings, which are based on six datasets and organized according to eleven studies, suggest that narcissism manifests differentially across the entrepreneurial process
Summary
Narcissism, a label that originates from the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own image, has seen an upsurge in both public and scholarly interest. Recent evidence has demonstrated that a moderate level of narcissism can be desirable within certain contexts and for fulfilling specific tasks, such as giving a job interview (Paulhus et al, 2013), making a presentation (Oltmanns et al, 2004), and making a first acquaintance (Back et al, 2010) Given their extroverted personality and self-enhancing behavioral tendencies, narcissists are likely to stand out from the crowd (Mehdizadeh, 2010; Nathan DeWall et al, 2011) and emerge as leaders (Grijalva et al, 2015; Nevicka et al, 2011). When narcissists emerge as leaders, they are often rated as more effective even if they are not more effective objectively (Deluga, 1997; Guedes, 2017; Nevicka et al, 2018)
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