The Ego in the Return-to-Office Mandate

Return-to-office mandates are being announced as productivity and culture interventions. New research from the Wharton School suggests the real driver is neither. After surveying thousands of executives and running controlled experiments, Adam Grant and colleagues found the only personality trait that consistently predicted opposition to remote work was narcissism. Not productivity concerns. Not trust in employees. Not a desire for collaboration. Ego. That finding reframes every RTO announcement made in the last three years and raises a question, what is this decision actually for?

What the Mandate Is For

A University of Pittsburgh study analysed RTO announcements from 54 large technology and financial firms in the S&P 500 and tracked what happened to their workforces afterwards using LinkedIn employment data from more than three million workers. Average voluntary turnover rose 14% after mandates. Time to fill vacancies increased 23%. The hire rate fell 17%. And the effect was concentrated among the most senior, most skilled, and most mobile employees - precisely the people a blanket attendance policy was least likely to bring back to productive in-office work, and most likely to push to a competitor still offering flexibility.

New research from the Wharton School, published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior in June 2026, provides the sharpest explanation yet. After surveying thousands of executives, middle managers and frontline supervisors, Adam Grant and colleagues found that the only personality trait that consistently predicted opposition to remote work was narcissism - the tendency toward self-centredness and entitlement. Productivity concerns, employee trust, the desire for collaboration: none of these predicted RTO mandates. And in a causal experiment, when leaders were primed to reflect on ego-driven leadership, they became significantly more likely to oppose remote work. The researchers found the same pattern among Fortune 500 CEOs, using established narcissism proxies - compensation-to-peer ratios, photo prominence in company reports - and found the higher the score, the more likely the CEO was to make negative statements about remote and hybrid work during the pandemic.

The Pittsburgh research points in the same direction: mandates were more likely at firms with powerful male CEOs after periods of poor stock performance, and produced no subsequent improvement in firm value. BambooHR's survey of more than 1,500 employees found 25% of VP and C-suite executives admitted they hoped the mandate would produce voluntary resignations - what the report called layoffs in disguise. The pattern is consistent: when you remove the productivity justification, what remains is power and control.

In Australia, the pattern is playing out in real time. NAB's 2025 requirement for junior staff to attend three days and team leaders four days drew an open letter from the Finance Sector Union and a meeting attended by more than a thousand employees. Commonwealth Bank's 50%-in-office directive for 20,000 staff was referred to the Fair Work Commission for conciliation. These are the predictable result of decisions made without a clear evidentiary basis, imposed on workforces that had restructured their lives around arrangements the same organisations had endorsed two years earlier.

The Diversity Cost

The Pittsburgh research found women's turnover rose nearly three times faster than men's after RTO mandates - a 20% increase for women against 7% for men. An Upwork survey of 2,500 global workers including C-suite executives found 63% of senior leaders acknowledged RTO mandates caused a disproportionate number of women to quit, and 57% said losing those women hurt productivity. The University of Toronto's research found 31% of professional women reported gender discrimination in a typical office month, compared with 17% when working remotely - describing remote work as a protective shield that mandates remove.

The disability picture is equally sharp. HILDA survey data shows workforce participation among people with a disability or health condition rose 4.4 percentage points between 2019 and 2023, directly linked to WFH availability. Amazon's 2025 requirement for disabled staff to undergo multi-level executive review to retain remote accommodations drew specific criticism from disability advocates. For people with disability, carers, and workers managing chronic illness, remote work wasn't a perk. It was the condition that made full contribution possible. RTO mandates withdraw that condition, and the valuable contribution of talented people goes with it.

None of this appears in the business case for most RTO mandates. The typical approval process includes a statement of collaboration or culture intent, an announcement, and an implementation plan. It doesn't include a modelled cost of replacing the senior women and other high performers who will leave against any quantified benefit from the increased in-person presence. That's a governance failure. No other decision involving a predicted cost of this magnitude - and the replacement cost of a senior employee runs between one and two times annual salary - would be approved by a serious board or ExCo without that analysis.

The Justifications Don't Hold Up

The three standard justifications for RTO mandates are collaboration, culture, and productivity. Each has been tested. None holds up for mandated attendance specifically.

On collaboration, the most-cited supporting study - Lin and colleagues' Nature paper on breakthrough research innovation - concerns voluntary geographic proximity between scientists working on long-term projects. It says nothing about whether requiring a knowledge worker to sit in an open-plan office three days a week improves their team's output. That specific claim has not been demonstrated rigorously. What has been demonstrated is that mandated presence produces coffee-badging - employees swiping in briefly to satisfy attendance requirements, then leaving or disengaging. A 2024 Gartner survey found 58% of employees at organisations with strict in-office policies said they comply in a way that meets the minimum requirement. That's compliance, not collaboration.

The collaboration claim also has a more specific answer than 'come back to the office.'

Grant and colleagues' review of the evidence finds people are most collaborative and creative when working remotely part of the week - using time at home for deep individual work and reserving office time for collective problem-solving. Atlassian found that a well-designed quarterly team gathering did more for connection and belonging than daily office attendance. The question the evidence consistently points to is what those days are actually for - the number matters far less than the purpose.

On culture, 46% of managers in BambooHR's survey cited culture improvement as their primary RTO goal. The Pittsburgh research found mandates produced significant declines in employees' ratings of corporate culture alongside job satisfaction. Glassdoor data from the same analysis found employee satisfaction dropped at 99% of firms that issued mandates. Organisations that mandated return hoping to rebuild pre-pandemic culture discovered something uncomfortable: what they'd had before wasn't as good as they remembered, and the mandate made that visible.

On productivity, the AICD Director Sentiment Index captures the governance gap that makes this relevant: over 40% of directors say flexible work has a negative impact on innovation, despite over 60% agreeing it aids recruitment, retention and wellbeing - and despite Australia's Productivity Commission having examined the productivity evidence and found flexible work is neutral to positive for output. These are the same people approving RTO mandates. The decision isn't being made on data. It's being made on the instincts of a leadership cohort that built their careers in offices, and whose own working lives have never depended on flexibility being available.

The People You Most Need to Keep

When a blanket RTO mandate is issued, the first people to act on it are typically the ones with the most options. A Gartner survey of more than 3,500 employees found one-third of executives and 19% of non-executives said they would leave over a five-day mandate. A separate Gartner survey of 2,080 knowledge workers found high performers' intent to stay was 16% lower under strict on-site requirements - double the effect on average performers. Cisco's 2025 Global Hybrid Work Study, surveying more than 21,500 employers and employees across 21 markets, found 78% of high performers had considered a career change due to their organisation's office policies, compared with 61% overall.

The University of Chicago and Michigan research on Microsoft, Apple and SpaceX found that after mandates, the share of senior employees fell by between four and fifteen percentage points at the affected firms, with departing seniors typically moving to direct competitors still offering flexibility. The people who stayed were, on average, less mobile - which is not the same as more committed. It is the same as having fewer options. That is not a talent pool most organisations would choose to build, but it is the outcome of a policy that selects for immobility.

High-Performing Hybrid

The organisations getting this right have made a different decision. They've moved past the binary - in office or at home - and designed for outcomes instead. They specify which activities genuinely benefit from co-location: onboarding, complex problem-solving, relationship-building, significant team decisions. They set coordination days, not attendance targets. They give teams the autonomy to design around those anchors. The result is purposeful presence, which the research consistently shows is what actually produces the collaboration benefits mandates claim to deliver but don't.

The mandate did not bring back your best people. It accelerated the decision they were already considering.

The Bottom Line

Before your organisation issues a return-to-office mandate, three questions should be on the table.

1. what is the modelled cost of the attrition this will produce, based on current voluntary turnover data segmented by seniority, gender, and performance rating (and any other relevant demographics)?

2. what specifically will increase because of mandated presence, and what's the evidence for that claim?

3. do the people making this decision have a clear-eyed view of whether any objections to flexible work are grounded in organisational need, or in something more personal?

These might be uncomfortable questions. But they are the ones that separate an approach grounded in evidence from one that will cost more than it delivers - in talent, in diversity, in productivity, and in the trust of the people the organisation most needs to stay.

SOURCES & FURTHER READING

• Australian Bureau of Statistics Working Arrangements, August 2025

• AICD Director Sentiment Index (series)

• BambooHR Employee Experience Survey March 2024

• Bloom N, Han R, Liang J. 'Hybrid Working from Home Improves Retention Without Damaging Performance.' Nature 630, 2024

• Cisco Global Hybrid Work Study 2025

• Ding W, Ma M et al. 'Return-to-Office Mandates and Brain Drain' University of Pittsburgh December 2024

• Gartner, 'High-Performers, Women, Millennials Are Greatest Flight Risks Under RTO Mandates' January 2024

• Grant A, Shandell M, Elliott C. 'Worship me at the office altar: Why narcissistic leaders resist remote work.' Journal of Organizational Behavior 2026

• Lin Y et al. 'Remote Collaboration Fuses Fewer Breakthrough Ideas.' Nature 603, 2023

• Productivity Commission, 'Productivity before and after COVID-19.' May 2025

• Van Dijcke D et al. 'Return to Office and the Tenure Distribution.' University of Chicago/Michigan 2024