Narcissistic personality disorder is characterized by extreme arrogance, selfishness, a tendency to manipulate others, and an inability to see the world through other people’s eyes. These traits can make people with these tendencies extremely annoying to deal with, but sometimes you don’t have a choice. Maybe it’s a coworker, boss, or relative whose arrogance and deceitfulness keep annoying you. Yet, you wake up one morning and decide to try to turn the relationship around, if only to be able to put your annoyance on the backburner or perhaps to save your job. When you see this person, instead of your usual attempt to slip away unnoticed, you approach them and make a friendly comment that starts a conversation. You hope to get a nice response in return.
However, all you get is an angry response, leaving you feeling like there’s something wrong with you for trying to exchange a few compliments. In a study by B. Parker Ellen III of Northeastern University and colleagues (2019) focused on the impact of having a narcissistic supervisor at work, suggesting that a “self-absorbed” boss creates significant stress for employees. In the workplace, employees don’t have the option of avoiding their supervisors, so they’re stuck having to deal with this unpleasant individual, if only in mandatory meetings or supervision sessions. Moreover, the self-absorbed supervisor is a near-ubiquitous trait in life because, as the authors point out, “subclinical narcissism has been found to facilitate leadership emergence in organizations” (p. 847). As much as employees try to deal with these toxic bosses, the results are almost always negative, but because they may not have other options for making a living, they have to find ways to cope. According to Ellen et al., this coping ability becomes a form of “resource management” that gives employees an “antidote” to the work stress of having a boss who enjoys making everyone feel unworthy. But simply having the resources may not be enough to help you get through this stress. According to the Boston team of authors, you have to be able to use them. If you’re so stressed that you can’t find a coping strategy, any strengths you have are usually irrelevant.
When you try to be nice to a narcissist, you’re using an emotion-focused form of coping that involves being optimistic and trying to see the best in the situation. As successful as this strategy is for dealing with normal people, it can be frustrating to find your efforts rebuffed when the person turns your kind comment into an attack. Ellen and others point out that the narcissist will display “displeasure” and will lack any remorse for any harm he or she has caused you. Furthermore, when there is a power imbalance, such as in a work environment, you’ll have to resort to your internal coping mechanisms to protect yourself from the harmful influences of this arrogant individual.
What resources can you use to help you deal with these unpleasant and controlling individuals? Examining the literature on resource management, research from Northeastern University used a scale that included the following items:
When work is stressful, I can conserve my energy.
I have enough equipment and staff at my disposal to fill my workspace when things get stressful.
When I feel my work “battery” is depleted, I can ask others to take on some of the load.
When work gets stressful, I can step away long enough to regain my strength.
I can adjust my work pace when things get hectic.
I can change my behavior at work to ensure that I am not running on an “empty tank” of energy and resources.
All of these would be excellent strategies to use to combat the behavior of any persistently controlling narcissist, but they are especially useful when this behavior occurs in a work environment. Ask yourself how you would answer this question to gauge your ability to leverage your resources to combat narcissism.
In their study of narcissistic bosses, the authors tested the resource management model across a series of three worker samples that included 187 municipal employees, 199 financial planners, and 147 pharmaceutical sales employees. The hypothesis guiding the analyses was that high scores on the resource management scale would moderate the effects of perceived supervisor narcissism on employee negative outcomes of emotional exhaustion, job stress, depressed mood, task performance, and “citizenship” behaviors such as voluntary assistance to other employees. In addition, Ellen and colleagues included control factors for age, gender, length of time the employee had been on the job, and the personality traits of openness and neuroticism. The results supported the study’s predictions, showing that employees with lower resource management abilities who perceived their boss as narcissistic predicted greater job stress, emotional exhaustion, depressed mood, and fewer citizenship behaviors. However, for employees with higher resource management ability, there appeared to be a positive effect on employee outcomes from perceiving a supervisor as high in narcissism. Instead of viewing supervisors as a threat to their resources, they viewed them as a challenge, resulting in what the authors described as a “virtuous spiral” (p. 858). Here, then, maybe your key to dealing with the person in your life who you perceive as narcissistic. Strive to find ways to tap into your internal resources and then change the way you view this individual. Although you may initially find yourself hurt by an unpleasant or ungrateful response to your attempts to be nice, don’t give up.
One limitation of Ellen et al.’s study was that the main measure of narcissism included supervisors’ perceptions through items such as “My boss has an inflated view of himself.” There is no real evidence beyond these subjective items to document the extent of a supervisor’s narcissism. The chain of cause and effect may not run from supervisor narcissism to employee outcomes, but rather in the opposite direction. People who are more unhappy and stressed out at work may have a less-than-ideal view of their supervisors. However, even this interpretation suggests that you can partially control the outcome when you encounter a narcissistic individual. Ask others for help in the situation, focus on your positive qualities, try to take a mental break, and find other sources of feeling competent and valuable. In short, it’s hard to be nice to a narcissist when your efforts to be nice backfire. Using some of the strategies identified in Ellen et al.’s study may provide you with the resolve you need to see this difficult individual not as a threat, but as a challenge.
