My name is Sam Vaknin. I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.
To a narcissistic boss or employer, the members of his staff, his employees, are sources of narcissistic supply and nothing else. Their role is to remember events that support the grandiose self-image of the narcissist, to regulate the narcissistic supply, to adulate, to adore, to admire, to agree, to affirm, to provide attention and approval, and generally to serve as an audience.
The staff or employees are supposed to remain passive. The narcissist is not interested in anything, but the simplest function of mirroring his grandeur, his achievements, his status.
When the mirror, the employee, acquires a personality and the life of its own, the narcissist is incensed. When independent-minded, an employee is perceived to be a kind of danger, and is in danger of being sacked by his narcissistic employer, an act which demonstrates the employer's omnipotence control over the employee.
The employee's presumption to be the employer's equal is rejected and vehemently and emotionally resented by the employer.
An employee should not try to befriend a narcissistic boss or a narcissistic employer. Friendship is possible only among equals, and to the narcissist, his employees and his staff are his inferiors. They are his property. He loads over them. He is superior to them.
Therefore, how can he be their friend?
Trying to become a narcissistic boss's or employee's friend constitutes an injury to the haughtiness and pride and arrogance of said boss or employer.
The narcissistic boss or employer is willing to accept his employees as underlings, a subordinates, whose very position serves to support his grandiose fantasies, but nothing else, and nothing about.
The grandiosity of a narcissistic boss or employer is precarious and tenuous. It rests on fragile foundations.
Any hint of equality with the employees, any disagreement, any criticism, and even any expression of an unfulfilled need threatens the narcissist profoundly.
The narcissist is exceedingly insecure deep inside. It is easy to destabilize the narcissist's impromptu personality, his false self.
His reactions, however disproportionate and rageful, are merely in self-defense.
Classic narcissistic behavior is when idealization is followed by devaluation.
At first, the narcissistic boss or employer idealizes the new employee. The new employee can do nothing wrong. He is perfect. He is brilliant. He is attuned to the narcissist's needs.
But then devaluation follows as a result of minor disagreements or merely because time has eroded the employee's capacity to serve as a fresh source of attention and narcissistic supply.
The veteran employee is taken for granted by his narcissistic employer and boss. He becomes uninspiring as a source of adulation, admiration, and attention.
The narcissist always seeks new thrills, new stimuli, provided through and via the attention given by new employees.
The narcissist is notorious for his low threshold of resistance to boredom. His behavior is impulsive. His biography is chaotic precisely because of his needs to introduce uncertainty and risk into what he regards as stagnation or slow death.
In other words, routine.
Narcissists abhor routines. Most interactions in the workplace though are part of the rut. They are routine and thus constitute a reminder to the narcissist that he is quote unquote stagnating, shackled, imprisoned, unappreciated, unable to realize his untapped potential.
The routine workplace deflates the narcissist grandiose fantasies.
So narcissists do many unnecessary wrong and even dangerous things in pursuit of restoring and stabilizing their inflated self image.
Narcissists feel suffocated by intimacy or by the constant reminders of real nitty gritty world out there. It reduces them. It makes them realize the gap between their fantasies and reality. It is a threat to the balance of their personality structures, the false self, which is invented and confabulated and concocted and the true self, which is dilapidated and dysfunctional.
So they treat routine and everyone connected to that routine as a menace.
Narcissists forever shift the blame, they pass the buck and they engage in cognitive dissonance. They pathologize the other by projecting on to him or her.
Traits, weaknesses, failures. They foster feelings of guilt and shame in their employees and their subordinates and use this guilt and shame to manipulate them.
They debate and humiliate their stuff in order to preserve their own sense of superiority.
Their pathological liar, they think nothing of confabulating or pathologically telling lies because it is because their very self is false. They are their own confabulation.
So what can you do with an narcissistic boss and employer?
Number one, never disagree with a narcissist or contradict him.
Number two, never offer the narcissist any intimacy.
Number three, look old and inspired by whatever attribute matters to the narcissist.
For instance, if he regards himself to be a professional, pretend that you are downstruck, that you are amazed by his professional achievements. If he considers himself good looking, comment on it repeatedly.
Never remind the narcissist of life out there, of the routine. And if you do, connect it somehow to his sense of grandiosity. You can aggrandize even ordering office supplies.
The most mundane thing conceivable. You can say for instance, these are the best art material any workplace is going to have, or we get these office supplies exclusively because of you and your connections and so on. Aggrandize the narcissist.
Do not make any comment which might directly or indirectly impinge on the narcissist's self image, omnipotence, superior judgment, omniscience, skills, capabilities, professional record, or even omnipresence.
Bad sentences start with, I think you overlooked this and that. I believe you made a mistake here. You don't know that. Do you know that?
Etc, etc.
Or you were not here yesterday. You should not.
These kinds of sentences are interpreted by the narcissist as rude impositions and they react very badly to these injurious restrictions and hints at their lack of omnipotence and lack of omniscience.
Manager of narcissistic goals.
Notice patterns in his bullying. Is he more aggressive on Monday mornings? Is he more open to suggestions on Friday afternoons? Is he unable to flattery? Can you modify his contact by appealing to his morality, superior knowledge, good manners, good looks, cosmopolitanism, or upbringing?
Manipulating the narcissist is the only way you as an employee can survive in such contaminated and tainted workpiece.