It’s Hard but Not Impossible to Be Nice to a Narcissist

Narcissism is marked by extreme grandiosity, self-centeredness, a tendency to manipulate others, and an inability to see the world from other people’s eyes. These qualities can make people with these tendencies to be more than a little irritating to interact with, but sometimes you have no choice. Perhaps it is a coworker, a boss, or a relative whose constant self-aggrandizement and deviousness continue to irritate you. However, you wake up one morning and decide to try to turn the relationship around, if for no other reason than to be able to put your annoyance on a back burner or, perhaps, to save your job. When you see this person, instead of your usual attempt to get away without being noticed, you approach, and make a friendly, conversation-starting comment. Your hope was that you’d get back a nice response in return. However, all you get is a grumpy retort, making you feel that there was something wrong with you for trying to exchange a few pleasantries.

Focusing on the impact of having a narcissistic supervisor at work, B. Parker Ellen III of Northeastern University and colleagues (2019), propose that the “full-of-self” boss creates major stress on employees. In a work setting, employees do not have the choice of avoiding their supervisors, so they are stuck with having to deal with this unpleasant individual, if only for mandatory meetings or supervisory sessions. Furthermore, the full-of-self supervisor is an almost ubiquitous feature of life because, as the authors point out, “subclinical narcissism has been found to facilitate leader emergence in organizations” (p. 847). As much as employees try to cope with these bad bosses, the outcomes are almost always adverse, but because they may have no other options for making a living, they have to find ways to cope. That ability to cope, according to Ellen et el., becomes a form of “resource management” that gives employees “an antidote” to the work stress of having a boss who enjoys making everyone else feel unworthy. Just having resources may not be enough to help pull you through this stress, however. According to the Boston-based author team, you have to be able to use them. If you are so stressed that you can’t even find your way to a coping strategy, whatever strengths you would ordinarily possess become irrelevant.

To be sure, when you try being nice to a narcissistic person, you’re using a form of emotion-focused coping involving optimism and trying to see the best in a situation. As much as that strategy works in interactions with ordinary people, it can be frustrating to find your efforts rebuffed when this individual turns your kind comment into an attack on you. Ellen et al. note that the narcissistic person will exhibit “disagreeableness” and will lack any remorse for whatever harm they cause you. Furthermore, when there is a power imbalance, as there is in a work setting, you are left with little recourse other than to turn to your own internal coping mechanisms to shield yourself from the harmful effects of that full-of-self individual.

What, then, are the resources that you can use to help you cope with these unpleasant and controlling individuals? Examining the previous literature on resource management, the Northeastern University-led research used a measure that included the following items:

1. When work is stressful, I am able to conserve my energy.
2. I have enough equipment and personnel at my disposal to fill in for me at work when things get stressful.
3. When I feel like my ‘battery is run down’ at work, I can get others to pick up some of the load.
4. When work gets overwhelming, I am able to get away long enough to regain my strength
5. I am able to pace myself at work when things get hectic
6. I can change my behavior at work to ensure that I don’t run ‘on an empty tank’ in terms of energy and resources.

All of these would be excellent strategies to use to combat any narcissist's constant overbearing behavior, but are particularly useful when that behavior occurs in a work setting. Ask yourself how you would answer to gauge your own ability to dip into your narcissist-fighting resources.

In their study on narcissistic bosses, the authors tested the resource management model across a series of three samples obtained from workers which included 187 municipal employees, 199 financial planners, and 147 medical sales employees. The hypothesis guiding the analyses was that high scores on the resource management measure would attenuate the effects of perceived supervisor narcissism on the negative employee outcomes of emotional exhaustion, job tension, depressed mood, task performance, and “citizenship” behavior such as voluntarily pitching in to help out other employees. Additionally, Ellen and his collaborators included the control factors of age, gender, length of time employed, and the personality traits of extraversion and neuroticism. The findings supported the study’s predictions, showing that for employees with lower resource management abilities, perceiving the boss as narcissistic predicted more tension at work, emotional exhaustion, depressed mood, and fewer citizenship behaviors.

However, for employees with higher resource management, there seemed to be a positive effect on employee outcomes of perceiving a supervisor as high in narcissism. Instead of seeing their supervisors as a threat to their resources, they viewed them as a challenge, creating what the authors describe as a “beneficial spiral” (p. 858). Here, then, may be your key to dealing with the person in your life you regard as a narcissist. Try hard to find ways to draw from your internal resources and then, change the way you perceive that individual. Although you may find yourself initially hurt by an unpleasant retort or ungrateful response to your attempts to be pleasant, don’t give up.

A limitation of the Ellen et al. study was that the key measure of narcissism involved perceptions of supervisors with items such as “My boss has an inflated view of him-/herself.” There is no real evidence other than these subjective items to document just how narcissistic the supervisor was. Indeed, the cause and effect chain may be not from supervisor narcissism to employee outcomes, but in the opposite direction. People who are unhappier and more exhausted from work may have a less than ideal view of their supervisors. Even this interpretation, however, suggests that you can partially control the outcome when you are confronted with a narcissistic individual. Ask for help from others in the situation, focus on your own positive attributes, try to get a mental break, and find other sources of feeling competent and worthwhile.

To sum up, it is tough to be nice to a narcissistic person when your efforts to be kind backfire. Using some of the strategies identified in the Ellen and colleagues study may provide you with the resolve you need to see this difficult individual not as a threat, but as a challenge.