Why good teams struggle under narcissistic CEOs?

Purpose This study examines how Chief Executive Officer (CEO) narcissism relates to conflict dynamics within top management teams (TMTs) and identifies the team-level conditions under which conflict's association with team effectiveness is amplified or contained. Design/methodology/approach Integrating Upper Echelons Theory (UET) with group process theory and information processing theory, we test a moderated-mediation model using cross-sectional survey data from 115 senior TMT members, each serving as a single key informant, in mainland Chinese firms. CEO narcissism is assessed through other-ratings to reduce social desirability bias. Hypotheses are then tested using bootstrapped conditional process analyses based on composite scores. Findings CEO narcissism is positively associated with team conflict and negatively associated with team effectiveness, with team conflict partially mediating the association. The two stages of the model behave asymmetrically. Downstream, cooperative conflict management and agreement-seeking behavior buffer the negative conflict–effectiveness association, which becomes non-significant at high levels of either moderator, and conditional process models confirm moderated mediation at this stage. Upstream, and contrary to prediction, the narcissism–conflict association becomes stronger at higher levels of team trust and decision commitment, although both conditions are associated with lower overall conflict. Originality/value This study examines the executive team, where prior research has documented narcissism's firm-level outcomes and compositional effects but has left intra-team dynamics underexplored. It identifies team conflict as a proximal mechanism transmitting part of the CEO narcissism–effectiveness association; tests the two-stage conditional process architecture as an integrated system with indices of moderated mediation rather than piecewise; and shows the two stages are asymmetric – downstream integrative mechanisms contain conflict's damage, whereas upstream relational conditions long assumed protective coincide with lower conflict but a stronger narcissism–conflict link.