4. Discussion
A rising tide of employee narcissism could present significant problems for organizations, their productivity, and longterm profitability. The research clearly finds significant negative outcomes associated with narcissism e many of which directly relate to business, such as rapidly depleting common resources (Campbell et al., 2005), white collar crime (Blickle et al., 2006), and risky decision-making (Campbell et al., 2004). Considering the evidence indicating significant increases in narcissism among Millennials (Twenge et al., 2008) and even higher levels of narcissism amongst business students (Bergman, Westerman, & Daly, 2010; Westerman et al., 2012), we must work toward a greater understanding of the role of business higher education in stemming this tide. This research represents the first study to examine whether narcissism plays a role in the educational process. Specifically, this study investigated the relationship between faculty-student congruence on narcissism and student performance and student perceptions of the difficulty of the class and status of the professor. Results supported the hypotheses, in that narcissism fit was significantly related to a student's final grade in the class such that less congruence was associated with lower course grades and that this association is partially mediated by perceived professor status and class difficulty. Moreover, our results indicated that professor status and class difficulty were influenced by dyadic discrepancies in trait narcissism such that perceptions were lower for students with either significantly higher or lower levels of narcissism than their respective faculty.
