The glorification of greed beyond the business school: how popular wall street narratives relate to future work selves

Popular Wall Street narratives, such as The Wolf of Wall Street, have become large box-office successes, reaching wide audiences. In three exploratory mixed-method experiments, this study investigates how popular Wall Street narratives relate to students’ and sales employees’ future work selves – who they aspire to become in their future career. The findings indicate that characters in narratives glorifying greed are considered more desired future work selves in comparison to characters in critical or non-greed narratives. Morally ambiguous greedy characters were perceived through a “winner frame” of self-made success, and were associated with lower empathy levels, while narratives from a “victim perspective” – with characters suffering as a result of financial malpractice – were associated with higher empathy levels. This empirical study contributes to theory and practice on the appeal of greedy characters and how stories could perpetuate a culture of greed and dominant logic of shareholder-value maximization in Wall Street.