Do Birds of a Feather Flock Together? The Joint Effects of Manager and Subordinate Narcissism on Performance Evaluation

Miriam K. Maske and Matthias Sohn

European Accounting Review, 2025, vol. 34, issue 1, 31-55

Abstract: This study investigates the interaction of superior and subordinate manager narcissism on subjective performance evaluation. We build on extant research in the psychology literature and propose that superiors evaluate narcissistic subordinates less favorably than non-narcissistic subordinates. However, based on the homophily effect (i.e., the tendency of like to associate with like), we also hypothesize that narcissistic superiors show greater tolerance toward narcissistic subordinates than non-narcissistic superiors do. We conduct two online experiments and find that superiors, both high and low in narcissism, evaluate narcissistic subordinates less favorably than non-narcissistic subordinates. Our results further show that this effect is mediated by the superiors’ weaker feelings of closeness to narcissistic subordinates. Finally, we find that superiors high in narcissism show greater feelings of closeness to narcissistic subordinates and, hence, evaluate them more favorably than non-narcissistic superiors do. Our results provide novel insight into the pivotal role of individual traits in subjective performance evaluation.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09638180.2023.2235379 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:euract:v:34:y:2025:i:1:p:31-55

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/REAR20

DOI: 10.1080/09638180.2023.2235379

Access Statistics for this article

European Accounting Review is currently edited by Laurence van Lent

More articles in European Accounting Review from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().