Working With a Narcissistic Colleague: Strategies for Driven Professionals

NARCISSISTIC ABUSE • April 24, 2026

The Colleague Who Makes Everything About Them

Leila is a 42-year-old venture partner, and she has a rule she’s developed over two decades in tech: she never shares a deal before it closes with certain colleagues. She didn’t always have this rule. She developed it after watching her own pipeline show up in a peer’s partner meeting presentation, reframed as a collaborative “team effort” she hadn’t been invited to. The attribution wasn’t credited. The deal wasn’t yet hers. The relationship was not recovered.

She kept the colleague. She just rebuilt the protocol. Now she keeps two versions of every update — the one she shares in the team meeting and the one that contains the information she actually needs protected until a close is certain. She calls this “information hygiene.” Her therapist calls it a trauma adaptation. They’re both right.

What makes a narcissistic colleague distinctly difficult is the ambiguity of the peer dynamic. They don’t have power over you — not formally. Which means the harm they do is harder to name, harder to report, and easier for the organization to dismiss as “interpersonal conflict” rather than what it actually is: a pattern of behavior organized around their needs at your expense. In my work with clients, I see driven, ambitious women spend enormous energy trying to resolve this kind of conflict through the assumption that if they can just communicate more clearly, collaborate more generously, or be more patient, the dynamic will shift. It doesn’t shift. What shifts is your understanding of the terrain — and then your strategy for navigating it.

What Is a Narcissistic Colleague?

Peer narcissism in the workplace operates differently than boss narcissism — which is part of why it’s so consistently underestimated. The colleague doesn’t have the formal power to fire you, evaluate you, or determine your compensation. But in most professional environments, colleagues hold enormous informal power: over your reputation, your access to collaborative opportunities, your standing in the team’s social architecture, and the narrative about your work that circulates in spaces you’re not in.

Ramani Durvasula, PhD, clinical psychologist and researcher specializing in narcissistic personality disorder, author of It’s Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People, notes that the narcissistic colleague often presents initially as a gifted collaborator — enthusiastic, idea-generating, collegial. The warmth is real in the early phase. What it’s built on is the potential utility of the relationship. As that utility becomes clear to them, the dynamic shifts: collaboration becomes appropriation, peer support becomes subtle undermining, and the initial warmth gives way to a particular kind of instrumental friendliness that leaves you feeling vaguely unseen even in positive interactions.

Clinical markers of a narcissistic colleague: Do they regularly reference their own contributions in team settings in ways that minimize others’? Do they manage upward with extraordinary skill while being inconsistent or difficult in peer interactions? When you succeed at something, is their response warm in the moment but followed by a pattern of reduced collaboration or subtle distancing? Do other colleagues seem to hold a different view of them than your direct experience suggests? These patterns don’t emerge from difficult personality — they emerge from a specific psychological structure organized around self-promotion.

The Neurobiology of Peer Manipulation

One of the most disorienting features of a narcissistic colleague dynamic is that it produces a physiological stress response that doesn’t match the perceived severity of the situation. You’re not afraid for your safety. They’re not your boss. The harm isn’t dramatic or obvious. And yet you dread team meetings, rehearse conversations before they happen, experience a particular kind of exhaustion after interactions that shouldn’t be this taxing.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, author of The Body Keeps the Score, describes how social threat — which is exactly what peer manipulation constitutes — activates the same neural circuits as physical threat. The brain doesn’t distinguish between a predator and a colleague who is systematically undermining your professional reputation. Both register in the threat-detection system, and both produce the chronic low-grade activation that, over time, depletes executive function, narrows creative thinking, and erodes the sense of safety that enables you to do your best work.

What I see consistently in my work with clients is the shame that accompanies this response. Driven, ambitious women who have navigated genuine hardship without losing their composure are confused and embarrassed by the intensity of their reaction to a colleague. They interpret the intensity as disproportionate. It isn’t. It’s a precise measure of how much social and professional exposure the dynamic is producing — exposure that their nervous systems are accurately registering even when their cognitive framing is minimizing it.

How Narcissistic Colleagues Target Driven Women

Driven, ambitious women aren’t random targets for narcissistic colleagues. They’re chosen targets — and understanding why changes how you relate to what’s happening.

A narcissistic colleague’s primary resource is status, and status in most professional environments is relative. Your competence, your visibility, your relationships with leadership — all of these exist in the same field as theirs. Your advancement isn’t neutral to a narcissistic colleague. It’s a perceived diminishment of their own standing. Which is why the dynamic often intensifies precisely when things are going well for you.

Jordan, a 46-year-old CMO at a consumer brand, noticed the pattern clearly in retrospect: every time she landed a significant result — a campaign overperformance, a successful pitch to the board — her peer’s behavior shifted within days. The subtle undermining would intensify. The jokes with an edge would surface in settings where she couldn’t respond without looking defensive. The narrative about her management style — “she’s brilliant but difficult” — seemed to get slightly more circulation. She didn’t connect these events to her successes until she made a timeline. The correlation was nearly perfect.

Priya, a 33-year-old biotech researcher navigating her postdoc, experienced a similar dynamic with a peer in her lab. He was collegial in one-on-one interactions, but in the principal investigator’s group meetings, he consistently attributed their shared findings to his own analysis — not dishonestly enough to constitute misconduct, but reliably enough that Priya found herself over-documenting, over-communicating, over-explaining her contributions in ways that read as insecure. She was performing defensiveness in response to a threat her mind hadn’t fully named. Her nervous system had named it weeks earlier.

Institutional Betrayal: When the Organization Sides with Them

One of the most painful dimensions of a narcissistic colleague dynamic is what happens when you try to address it. Jennifer Freyd, PhD, psychologist and researcher who developed the concept of institutional betrayal, defines it as the additional harm done when an institution — meant to protect its members — fails to respond appropriately to wrongdoing, or actively compounds the harm through dismissal, minimization, or structural bias toward the higher-status party.

In workplace peer conflicts, institutional betrayal is endemic. The organization will frequently frame the dynamic as “a personality conflict” — which places you in equal proportion to the harm rather than as the person primarily affected. HR will suggest “conflict resolution” processes that put you in direct mediation with someone who is skilled at impression management and will use the structured setting to further position their narrative. Your manager, if they’re not your ally, may suggest you “find a way to work together” without engaging with the specifics of what’s actually happening.

All of this is profoundly demoralizing for driven, ambitious women who have built their professional identities on meritocracy. The belief that if you do excellent work, the excellent work will speak for itself — that belief gets shattered in these dynamics, and the shattering is its own kind of grief. If you’re experiencing this, trauma-informed therapy that explicitly addresses workplace betrayal can be extraordinarily helpful in processing the institutional piece alongside the interpersonal one.

Both/And: You Can Value Collaboration and Protect Yourself

One of the most corrosive aspects of navigating a narcissistic colleague is the false choice it seems to present: either you trust your colleagues and collaborate openly, or you protect yourself through information hygiene and professional distance. This feels like a values conflict — like protecting yourself requires becoming someone you don’t want to be.

It isn’t a values conflict. It’s a Both/And.

You can genuinely value open collaboration — be a person who believes in the power of shared work, who contributes generously, who builds real professional relationships built on trust — AND recognize that not every person in your professional environment is operating from the same set of values. These two things don’t cancel each other. Protecting yourself from a specific person who has demonstrated a consistent pattern of behavior that harms you is not the same as becoming a closed-off, paranoid professional. It’s discernment.

Leila’s information hygiene protocol didn’t make her a less collaborative venture partner. It made her a more sustainable one. She still shares generously with the colleagues whose behavior has earned that generosity. She protects appropriately with the one whose behavior has demonstrated it’s necessary. That’s not cynicism. That’s an accurate read of different relationships.

In my work with clients, I often find that the internalized belief that protection equals betrayal comes directly from early relational environments — families where having needs was framed as selfishness, where appropriate self-advocacy was labeled as difficult. If protecting yourself from a harmful colleague triggers significant guilt or self-doubt, that signal is worth exploring in therapy. The pattern almost always has roots that predate the workplace.

The Systemic Lens: Why Peer Narcissism Thrives in Competitive Cultures

Narcissistic colleague dynamics don’t emerge in a vacuum. They flourish in specific organizational conditions, and those conditions are worth naming clearly — because understanding the system helps you stop taking the entire weight of it personally.

Paul Babiak, PhD, and Robert Hare, PhD, forensic psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia, note in Snakes in Suits that narcissistic and psychopathic traits are particularly adaptive in environments with opaque evaluation criteria, high competition for limited advancement opportunities, and a culture that rewards the appearance of collaboration more than its substance. Most high-performance professional environments — private equity, venture capital, biotech, consulting, corporate leadership — meet all three criteria.

In these environments, the person who is most skilled at impression management — at presenting as collaborative while operating competitively — has a structural advantage over the person who is actually collaborative. This isn’t a moral failure of the narcissistic colleague. It’s a calibration of their behavior to the incentive structure of the environment. It is, however, a structural failure of the organization — and that failure is worth naming so that you stop attributing it entirely to something you could have prevented.

The women in executive coaching with me who are navigating these dynamics often arrive believing that the problem is something about them specifically — that they were too trusting, too open, too naive. What I see consistently is that they were operating with the relational assumptions that high-trust environments would reward. They weren’t naive. They were appropriately calibrated for a different kind of workplace than the one they were actually in.

Concrete Strategies for Navigating a Narcissistic Colleague

None of these strategies require you to become someone different. They require you to operate with greater intentionality in a specific relationship — which is a form of professional skill, not a compromise of your values.

Documentation as self-protection. Keep contemporaneous written records of your contributions, communications, and agreements with a narcissistic colleague. Not for legal purposes — though that may eventually matter — but because a narcissistic colleague will revise history with confidence and fluency, and having your own written record is the clearest anchor when your memory gets questioned.

Put agreements in writing. After any verbal agreement with a narcissistic colleague, follow up with a brief email: “Just confirming what we discussed —” and summarize clearly. This isn’t adversarial. It’s professional. But it also creates a record that’s harder to revise.

Manage upward visibility of your work directly. Don’t rely on a narcissistic colleague to accurately represent your contributions to leadership. Find appropriate, professional ways to ensure your work is visible on its own terms — briefings, written updates, direct relationships with stakeholders. This isn’t self-promotion for its own sake. It’s accurate attribution.

Limit emotional engagement. A narcissistic colleague draws sustenance from emotional reactions — both positive and negative. Maintaining a warm but professionally boundaried register in your interactions — responsive, factual, not cold — reduces the supply without triggering the retaliation that obvious disengagement can produce.

Build lateral alliances that don’t depend on them. Your professional reputation in your organization should be built on multiple relationships, not concentrated in any one person who has demonstrated they’ll use it for their own ends. Invest deliberately in peer relationships with colleagues whose behavior has earned your trust.

If you’re currently navigating a narcissistic colleague dynamic and the strategies above feel insufficient — if the impact on your confidence, your work product, or your sense of self is significant enough that it’s affecting more than one area of your life — one-on-one support from a therapist or coach who understands these dynamics is a legitimate and important resource. You don’t have to solve this entirely with professional strategy. Sometimes the most important work is the internal one.

Related Reading

Babiak, Paul, and Robert D. Hare. Snakes in Suits: Understanding and Surviving the Psychopaths in Your Office. Updated ed. HarperBusiness, 2019.

Durvasula, Ramani. It’s Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People. Open Field/Penguin Life, 2024.

Freyd, Jennifer J., and Pamela J. Birrell. Blind to Betrayal: Why We Fool Ourselves We Aren’t Being Fooled. John Wiley & Sons, 2013.

van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, 2014.

Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence — from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books, 1992.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer