Lai See | Who are the most narcissistic chiefs in Hong Kong?

The recently ran a report of a study into narcissistic chief executives of companies listed in New York, London and Sydney and those comprising the Hang Seng Index.

Chief executives of companies on the index were found to have narcissism levels that on average were the same as those of New York Stock Exchange firms, at 26 per cent. But two of the Hong Kong chiefs recorded the highest rankings in the study.

The aim of the study, by a team led by Alex Frino, dean of the Macquarie Graduate School of Management, was to examine the relationship between the levels of narcissism in chief executives and their use of "earnings management" - a technique that takes advantage of the flexibility in accounting rules and inflates profit figures.

"Narcissists often over-identify themselves with the organisations they lead. They assume the accounting targets to be their personal accomplishments and they translate them into their personal report card," Frino says.

The data determining which chief executives are narcissistic was compiled using a "natural language processing" technology developed by the research team to analyse a chief executive's use of the first-person pronouns (I, me, my, mine and myself) during the question-and-answer session of analyst conferences held by companies at earnings announcements, which are typically more candid and unstructured relative to the chief executive's address.

Almost 5,000 transcripts were analysed. The Hong Kong chief executives with the lowest rankings were Bank of China's Li Lihui, at 11 per cent, and Hang Seng Bank's Rose Lee Wai-mun, at 19 per cent. The chief executive with the highest narcissistic ranking was AIA Group's Mark Tucker, at 56 per cent, followed by Hang Lung Properties' Philip Chen Nan-lok, at 54 per cent. is not suggesting either of these two gentlemen would do anything untoward.