Indian MBA Students are Narcissists
B-schools are vanity fairs
One of the greatest corporate vices is narcissism. Narcissists make life difficult for co-workers, they take unjustified risks and tend to spend more money. Research also shows that business school students tend to be much more narcissistic than others.
“Once in business school, students confront an environment in which cheating is more common than in other majors and whose consequences for poor academic performance are low to nonexistent, particularly in graduate programs. Both of these environmental factors would increase a sense of entitlement as students face few-to-no adverse consequences for poor behaviour.
Narcissists would also take well to a context in which classroom evaluations reward the frequency of participation, something students with higher opinions of their thoughts would excel at,” writes Jeffrey Pfeffer, also at Business Week.
What should management programs do to develop less self-involved students? Business Week’s Patrick Clark ponders the question. He quotes a study performed by a team of researchers from Appalachian University in the US. The study found that one of the contributors to narcissism was the presence of professors who themselves were narcissistic. “If you want less narcissistic business grads, it might help you to hire less narcissistic faculty,” says Jim Westerman, one of the authors of the study.
Westerman and his associates conducted something called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory – a standardized test that provides a measure of a person’s narcissism – on a sample of 536 business school students and 16 of their professors. “It turned out that those students who scored more highly on the narcissism test got better grades in courses taught by highly narcissistic professors. Students with lower narcissism scores got lower grades and found courses taught by narcissists more difficult,” writes Clark.