Narcissistic rhetoric and crowdfunding performance: A social role theory perspective

Abstract

Drawing from clinical and organizational narcissism research, we develop a novel measure of narcissistic rhetoric, investigating its prevalence in a sample of 1863 crowdfunding campaigns. An experiment using 1800 observations further validates our measure and confirms our hypothesized inverted-U relationship between narcissistic rhetoric and crowdfunding performance. Leveraging social role theory, we explore sex, sexual orientation, and race as potential moderators of this relationship. Moderation tests reveal LGBTQ entrepreneurs generally yield greater performance when using narcissistic rhetoric than heterosexuals while racial minorities underperform Caucasians using narcissistic rhetoric. Our findings suggest successful crowdfunding campaigns must balance narcissistic rhetoric with entrepreneurs' perceived social roles.