You know the type. Talented, quick, often right. And somehow every meeting with them ends with someone else’s idea flattened, a colleague quietly fuming, and you wondering whether this counts as “a performance issue” or just a personality you’re supposed to live with.
Confidence is a gift in an employee. Arrogance is something else: it takes the room’s oxygen and leaves the rest of the team gasping. The tricky part is that the arrogant person rarely sees it, and the people around them rarely say it out loud. So it lands on you.
Most advice on this boils down to “stay calm, give feedback, document everything.” Fine as far as it goes. But some of the popular tips (like quietly isolating the person so they work alone) can backfire, and the research explains why. Below are 13 ways to handle an arrogant employee that hold up against the evidence, plus what to do when you get it wrong. If you manage people, it’s worth reading alongside our guide on how to be a good boss.
1. Name the behavior, not the personality
“You’re arrogant” is a verdict. It invites a debate you will lose, because the person will simply disagree. What you can talk about is what they did.
That distinction has a research basis. In a 2024 systematic review in the International Journal of Management Reviews, Graeme Mitchell and colleagues at Flinders University looked at 42 scholarly articles on workplace arrogance published between 2000 and September 2023. Across the definitions they examined, arrogance came down to two parts: a misplaced sense of superiority, and the way it shows up as disparaging behavior toward others. The second part is the one you can see, describe and ask someone to change. The first part is inside their head, and you’re not their therapist.
Picture this: in Tuesday’s planning call, your senior analyst cuts off a junior colleague mid-sentence with “that’s been tried, it doesn’t work,” then moves on. That’s a behavior. It has a time, a place and an effect. “He thinks he’s better than everyone” isn’t something you can put in a conversation without starting a fight.
Give it a go: before you talk to anyone, write down three specific moments from the last two weeks. Who was there, what was said, what happened next. If you can’t list three, you may be reacting to a vibe rather than a pattern.
2. Stay calm in the moment, but don’t let it pass
Snapping back in public rarely works. It hands the arrogant person an audience and a story about the unfair manager. But saying nothing has a cost too, and it’s bigger than most managers assume.
Zhanna Lyubykh, an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business, makes this point bluntly in a piece for The Conversation co-written with workplace-aggression researchers. Their meta-analysis pulled together 149 articles and more than 111,000 participants, and found that bystanders stepped in only in the controlled conditions of experiments, not in real workplaces. Her conclusion: you can’t count on colleagues to fix it. Leaders have to. She also argues that minor incidents (sarcastic remarks, eye-rolling, dismissive gestures) deserve attention, because left alone they become part of how the team operates.
The mechanism is simple enough. Every time a cutting comment goes unanswered, the room learns that it’s allowed. Lyubykh’s practical suggestion is low drama: redirect the conversation, bring the interrupted person back in, or suggest a short break, then deal with the instigator privately later. Something like “Hang on, I want to hear Priya finish that thought” takes four seconds and costs nobody face. Working on your own emotional intelligence makes that calm redirect much easier to pull off when you’re irritated.
3. Count what the behavior is costing you
It’s easy to tolerate arrogance from a high performer because their output is visible and the damage isn’t. Numbers help make the damage visible.
SHRM’s Civility Index has tracked rudeness and disrespect among U.S. workers since early 2024 on a 100-point scale, where higher means more incivility. The workplace-level score has been creeping upward:
| SHRM Civility Index edition | Workplace-level score (out of 100) |
|---|---|
| Q2 2025 | 38.8 |
| Q4 2025 | 39.9 |
| Q2 2026 | 41.9 |
The Q2 2026 workplace score is the highest since tracking began, and the society-level score crossed 50 for the first time. These are self-reported survey figures, not observed behavior, and the index measures incivility broadly rather than arrogance specifically. Still, the cost side is concrete. In SHRM’s Q3 2025 edition, workers reported losing an average of 35 minutes per uncivil act and staying away from work about 0.7 days a month to avoid it.
An arrogant employee who belittles two or three people a week is quietly eating hours of other people’s focus. That’s a business problem, and it’s much easier to raise with your own boss or HR when you frame it that way. If raising it feels intimidating, our guide on how to be more courageous covers the mindset side.
Start small: for one week, keep a tally of incidents and roughly how long each one derailed the people involved. You’ll have something more persuasive than “he’s difficult.”
4. Have the private conversation with a clear structure
When you do sit down with them, structure keeps you on the facts and keeps them from turning it into a debate about your motives.
The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) teaches a framework called Situation-Behavior-Impact, and in an August 2025 article it laid out an extended version with a fourth step, Intent. You describe the specific situation, the observable behavior, and its impact, then ask what they were trying to achieve. CCL’s own example contrasts “You were rude” with a factual description of being interrupted while presenting the monthly budget. The first invites denial. The second is hard to argue with.
That last step matters more with confident people than you’d think. Theory published in the Academy of Management Review in 2025 by Ivana Vranjes, Zhanna Lyubykh and Sandy Hershcovis proposes that people confronted about mistreating others usually react defensively at first, but are more open when the feedback criticizes the behavior without attacking the person. It’s a theoretical model rather than a tested result, so treat it as a sensible hypothesis, not proof. Asking about intent gives the person a way to save face while still owning the impact.
Here’s a simple way in: “In yesterday’s client call, when Sam raised the timeline risk, you said ‘that’s a junior question’ and moved on. Sam didn’t speak again for the rest of the call. What were you going for there?” Then stop talking. Our article on how to argue without fighting has more on keeping these exchanges from turning into a contest.
5. Expect pushback and plan for it
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the people who most need the feedback are often the least likely to accept it.
A preregistered experiment by Christoph Heine, Stefan Schmukle and Michael Dufner, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science in 2025, tested this with 1,744 German adults aged 18 to 89. Participants took a test of social sensitivity and were randomly told they had done either very well or very badly. Those who got bad news became more defensive overall: they rated the test as less valid and its creators as less competent. That reaction was stronger among people with high self-esteem and among those high in narcissistic admiration, the pride-and-self-importance side of narcissism. One limit: the study only looked at feedback about social sensitivity, so it may not generalize to every kind of work feedback.
So when your employee says “That’s not what happened” or “Sam’s just oversensitive,” it isn’t a sign you’ve failed. It’s the predictable first move. In Heine’s data, defensiveness was stronger when a person’s self-esteem was tied to the very skill being judged. If they pride themselves on being the smartest person in the room, feedback about intellect will sting more than feedback about punctuality.
Next time, do this: decide in advance what you won’t debate. You can listen to their version, but the impact on Sam isn’t up for negotiation. Say “I hear that you didn’t mean it that way. The effect was still that Sam stopped contributing, and that’s what needs to change.” For more on staying steady when someone pushes back hard, see how to deal with people who are angry at you.
6. Pair correction with genuine recognition
This sounds like the “compliment sandwich,” and it isn’t. The sandwich hides criticism between two bits of filler praise. What works better is separate, specific, frequent recognition of what the person genuinely does well, so the corrective conversations don’t arrive in a vacuum.
Gallup and Workhuman surveyed 4,439 U.S. employees in April 2024 and combined it with Gallup’s wider workforce data. Among employees who got both feedback and recognition from their manager at least weekly, 61% were engaged. Among those who got weekly feedback but less frequent recognition, it was 38%. Employees who strongly agreed they got valuable feedback from colleagues were five times as likely to be engaged and 57% less likely to be burned out. These are correlations from survey data, not proof that recognition causes engagement, and this edition is now about two years old.
With an arrogant employee, this does something specific. Much arrogance is a bid for status. If their real contributions are acknowledged clearly and regularly, they have less need to grab status by putting others down, and your criticism reads as fair rather than as a personal campaign.
A quick experiment: for the next month, give this person one specific, honest piece of recognition every week (“the way you restructured the data model saved the team two days”). Keep it separate from any correction. Watch whether the next difficult conversation goes differently.
7. Let reality do some of the talking
Arguing with an overconfident person about whether they know something rarely works. Giving them a chance to test it often does.
A 2025 paper in the Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society by Federica Ruzzante and colleagues ran two studies, with 260 and then 828 participants. People rated their intellectual humility, took a short knowledge test with a “don’t know” option, and rated their humility again. In both studies, humility scores rose after the test. The authors are honest that the effect was small, the first study’s single-session design leaves room for demand effects, and they didn’t test why it worked. Still, the idea is promising: contact with the edges of your own knowledge nudges you toward humility in a way a lecture doesn’t.
At work, the equivalent is calibration. Ask the confident employee to put a number on a prediction (“How many days will the migration take? How sure are you?”) and then compare it with what actually happens. Ask them to explain step by step how a proposal will work, not just assert that it will. Curiosity is the natural antidote here, which is why we’re big fans of staying curious as an adult.
Your move: in your next one-to-one, ask them to write down an estimate and a confidence level for one piece of work. Revisit it together when the work is done, with no gloating. The data will make the point for you.
8. Put expectations in writing
A surprising amount of arrogant behavior survives because “how we treat each other here” was never actually spelled out. People can’t meet a standard that only exists in the manager’s head.
And clarity is getting worse, not better. Gallup’s latest U.S. employee engagement report, published in October 2026 and based on 21,648 workers surveyed in August 2026, found just 46% strongly agreed they know what is expected of them at work. That’s down from 49% in the first half of 2026 and far below the 2015 peak of 61%. Gallup links the drop to how well organizations communicate expectations, and notes that managers are the ones who turn plans into clear expectations, especially for remote and hybrid staff.
For an arrogant employee, vague expectations are a gift. “Be a team player” lets them argue that they are. “In meetings, let colleagues finish before responding, and challenge ideas, not people” is much harder to wriggle out of. Being more organized at work helps here too: keep these standards somewhere everyone can see them, not buried in a handbook.
Test it this week: write three behavioral expectations for your team (everyone, this person included), share them in a team meeting, and ask for input. Applying the same rules to everyone makes it much harder for anyone to claim they’re being singled out.
9. Don’t freeze them out
This is where the common advice goes wrong. Giving an arrogant employee solo projects and keeping interactions short feels like a tidy fix. The evidence suggests it may make things worse.
In a set of studies published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in February 2025, Christiane Büttner of the University of Basel and colleagues looked at narcissism and social exclusion using several data sources: a German panel of 1,592 people, a two-week phone study with 323 participants, experiments with more than 2,500 people, and a New Zealand survey of over 72,000 people tracked across 14 years. According to the American Psychological Association’s summary of the research, people higher in narcissism reported being excluded more often, were quicker to read ambiguous situations as exclusion, and were genuinely avoided more by others. The link ran both ways over time: feeling excluded was followed by rising narcissism a year later, and vice versa. Büttner warned this could feed escalating tensions in workplaces.
Two caveats. The research measured grandiose narcissism, which overlaps with arrogance but isn’t the same thing, and much of it is correlational. But the pattern is a warning against the “isolate them” strategy. Pushing the person to the edges can confirm their story that everyone is against them, and they may come back sharper.
The better move is structured inclusion: keep them in the team, but give them roles where their strengths help others and their behavior is visible, such as reviewing a junior’s work with clear guidelines on how to give that feedback. Basic social skills can be coached, and they’re easier to coach in a team than in isolation.
10. Set a team norm that brilliance doesn’t excuse bad behavior
Individual conversations work better when the culture backs them up. If the unwritten rule is “results excuse everything,” your feedback will feel optional.
Netflix is the best-known example of a company that wrote the opposite rule down. Its 2009 culture deck famously said it would not tolerate “brilliant jerks” because the cost to effective teamwork was too high. When Netflix replaced the deck with a new Culture Memo in 2024, the wording changed but the principle stayed: the current memo says there is no place on its team for people who don’t treat colleagues with decency and respect, and lists giving and receiving feedback as a core value. Netflix pairs this with its “keeper test,” where managers ask whether they would fight to keep someone, and part ways if the answer is no.
You don’t have to run your team like Netflix, and plenty of people find its performance culture harsh. The useful lesson is narrower. Netflix made respect an explicit part of what “high performance” means, so a star who demeans colleagues isn’t a star by definition. That changes the conversation from “you’re great, but…” to “this is part of the job.”
Give it a go: at your next team meeting, add one line to how you describe good performance, something like “We judge work on results and on how we treat each other.” Then mean it in reviews.
11. Model the humility you want to see
Arrogance is contagious in both directions. If you never admit a mistake, never say “I don’t know,” and never change your mind in public, you’re teaching the whole team that confidence means certainty.
A 2025 meta-analysis in Personality and Individual Differences by Anthony Silard, Chao Miao, Arménio Rego and colleagues pulled together the research on leader-expressed humility. They found it explains important outcomes for followers beyond what transformational leadership already explains, and that its effects vary with national culture, specifically individualism versus collectivism and religiosity. An earlier meta-analysis by Yifei Luo and colleagues at Renmin University, published in Frontiers in Psychology in December 2022 and drawing on 53 studies with 16,534 people, linked humble leadership with more employee voice and trust. Both are largely correlational, so they show humble leaders and good outcomes tend to go together rather than proving one causes the other.
For your arrogant employee, your behavior is a reference point. If you openly say “I got that forecast wrong, here’s what I missed,” you make it safer for them to do the same, and you take away the excuse that admitting error is weakness.
Start small: in your next team meeting, share one thing you got wrong recently and what you changed. Keep it brief and matter-of-fact.
12. Look after the people around them
While you focus on the arrogant employee, the rest of the team is watching how you respond. Your silence tells them something.
SHRM’s Q3 2025 Civility Index found that 66% of U.S. workers felt their manager could have done more to stop rude behavior, and 63% said their manager had overlooked uncivil acts entirely. Those are self-reports from one survey edition, but they point to a clear gap between what managers think they’re doing and what employees see. (SHRM’s newer Q2 2026 headline figures are public, but its detailed manager findings for that edition weren’t available to check.)
Research also shows how a team can turn on the target instead of the culprit. In a 2025 study in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, Zhanna Lyubykh, Laurie Barclay, Nick Turner and Sandy Hershcovis surveyed 554 employees who had recently witnessed mistreatment. When bystanders saw it as inevitable, or believed their workplace tolerated it, they were more likely to rationalize it, distance themselves from the person targeted, and join in negative gossip. In other words, unchecked arrogance doesn’t only hurt one colleague. It can quietly reshape who the team sees as “the problem.”
Next time, do this: after an incident, check in privately with the person on the receiving end. Acknowledge what happened, ask how they’re doing, and find a visible way to show you value their work, like asking them to present their idea at the next meeting. If you notice you’re running on empty from absorbing everyone’s frustration, our piece on protecting your energy around needy people has some useful boundaries.
13. Spell out consequences, then follow through
If the behavior continues after clear feedback, support and time, it has to move from conversation to process. And the process only works if people believe you’ll use it.
The UK’s workplace conciliation service, Acas, published a draft revised Code of Practice on disciplinary and grievance procedures in July 2026, with consultation closing that September. The draft says concerns about conduct are usually best handled informally first: explain the concern, listen, and agree what needs to change. If formal action follows, any warning should set out the problem, the improvement required, a timescale, and the possible consequences of further problems. It is still a draft, and UK-specific, so check your own local rules, but the sequence is sound practice almost anywhere. A YouGov survey for Acas, published in August 2026, found that 30% of 1,050 British senior decision-makers had seen rudeness to colleagues or customers lead to disciplinary action, tied for third among the behaviors listed.
Think of it like a referee showing a yellow card. The card only means something because everyone knows a red one exists and will actually be used. Warnings you never act on teach the arrogant employee, and everyone else, that the rules are decorative. Where the analogy breaks down: a referee decides in seconds, whereas you should give real time and support for change and document each step. If you’re someone who wobbles once you’ve made a hard call, our guide on how to stick to your decision may help.
Your move: write down, before the next review, exactly what will happen if nothing changes by a specific date. Share it with HR. Then tell the employee, calmly and in writing.
What to do when you slip
You will get this wrong sometimes. You’ll snap back in a meeting, or let a nasty comment slide because you were tired, or avoid the conversation for another week.
Letting it slide is the slip that does the most hidden damage. Research by Christine Hwang, Laurie Barclay and Daniel Brady, published in the Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies in 2026, looked at what happens when employees believe their manager failed to act on something harmful. Even a single instance could damage trust, including in managers who had a good relationship with that employee before. Employees noticed inaction more than managers assumed, and treated it as a meaningful choice rather than neutral. The authors’ advice for repair is straightforward: talk to the affected person, acknowledge what happened without getting defensive, apologize, take responsibility, and explain what you’ll do differently.
Then be decent to yourself about it. In an older but often-cited set of four experiments, published in 2012 in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Juliana Breines and Serena Chen at UC Berkeley found that people who responded to their own mistakes with self-compassion showed more motivation to make amends and to improve than those given a self-esteem boost. It’s one research group’s work and more than a decade old, but the logic holds: harsh self-criticism tends to make people defensive, which is exactly the trait you’re trying not to model. If a rough week leaves you replaying it all, try our steps for turning a bad day around.
The practical fix is short. Name the slip, repair with whoever was affected, and pick the next concrete step. One bad meeting doesn’t undo a month of consistent handling.
The bottom line
Our take: most arrogant employees aren’t villains. Plenty are capable people who’ve found that dominance gets results and have never been shown a clear, fair alternative. Your job isn’t to humble them. It’s to make the standard explicit, keep them inside the team, protect the people around them, and follow through when it matters.
Pick one strategy from this list and use it this week. The written expectations in point 8 are a good place to start because they help everyone on the team. For more on leading people well, browse our work articles.
