Entrepreneurs displaying narcissistic behavior are better able to convince investors to give them money when their grandiosity comes across as confidence as opposed to defensiveness or arrogance.
That’s what we learned from watching 12 seasons of the popular reality TV show Shark Tank to better understand how an entrepreneur’s psychological profile affects their ability to secure funding.
My research focuses on how entrepreneurs respond to challenges, including how personality affects their work. My colleagues and I based our study off the concept that there are two distinct “flavors” of narcissism: narcissistic admiration and narcissistic rivalry.
Narcissistic admiration means wanting others to like you and think highly of you, while its more contentious counterpart, narcissistic rivalry, refers to putting others down to feel better about yourself.
Our research, published in Organization Science last year, analyzed 789 pitches featured on Shark Tank. For each pitch in our sample, professional psychologists used a validated psychometric scale to score the founder-CEO’s admiration and rivalry behaviors. We then measured investors’ immediate reactions by analyzing the emotional tone of their response—how positive or negative their language was—and linked that sentiment to funding outcomes.
Narcissism was then measured for each CEO using our coding approach, producing continuous scores that range from lower to higher levels of narcissistic admiration and rivalry. Our analyses leverage this variation, particularly higher levels, but the sample itself was not constructed based on narcissism.
We concluded that founders who displayed narcissistic admiration were more likely to secure funding.
