Predicting career success: is the dark side of personality worth considering?

Abstract

Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to clarify whether the dark side of personality adds information beyond the bright side when predicting career success. Design/methodology/approach-In total, 287 participants (150♀, M age ¼ 37.74 and SD age ¼ 10.38) completed questionnaires on the Dark Triad (narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy) and the Big Five (emotional stability, extraversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness). They also provided information on their objective (salary and leadership position) and subjective (job satisfaction and satisfaction with income) career success. Regression analyses were used to estimate the Dark Triad's incremental predictive value. Findings-The results show that the Dark Triad only provides incremental information beyond the Big Five when predicting salary (ΔR 2 ¼ 0.02*) and leadership position (ΔR 2 ¼ 0.04*). In contrast, the Dark Triad does not explain unique variance when predicting job satisfaction or satisfaction with income. Research limitations/implications-The exclusive use of self-rated success criteria may increase the risk of same-source biases. Thus, future studies should include ratings derived from multiple perspectives. Practical implications-Considering the Dark Triad in employee selection and development seems particularly promising in the context of competitive behaviour. Social implications-The results are discussed in light of the socioanalytic theory. This may help to better understand behaviour in organisational contexts. Originality/value-This study is the first that simultaneously investigates all three traits of the Dark Triad and the Big Five in combination with objective and subjective career success. In addition, it extends previous findings by answering the question of whether the Dark Triad offers incremental or redundant information to the Big Five when predicting success.

Testing the relationships between narcissism, risk attitude, and income with data from a representative German sample

“…Career success reflects the accumulation of an individual's achievements as a result of their work experience and has intrinsic and extrinsic components (Judge et al, 1995). Grandiose narcissism has been found to be positively related to income in some studies (Paleczek et al, 2018;Spurk et al, 2016) but not in others (Hirschi & Jaensch, 2015), a difference that may arise from the use of convenience samples (Hirschi & Jaensch, 2015;Spurk et al, 2016). Furthermore, distinguishing between adaptive and maladaptive dimensions of grandiose narcissism may also explain the different findings (Leckelt et al, 2019).…”

“…There might be two major reasons for the contrast between our results and previous findings. First, previous studies (Hirschi & Jaensch, 2015;Paleczek et al, 2018) used either the NPI (Raskin & Hall, 1979) or the Dirty Dozen (Spurk et al, 2016), neither of which differentiate between the dimensions of narcissism and both of which contain somewhat "weaker" statements than the NARQ. Therefore, more people should be likely to choose higher ratings, thus leading to more variance in the narcissism variable.…”

The why and the how: A nexus on how opportunity, risk and personality affect entrepreneurial intention

“…Even though it is not without limitations, it is the most widely accepted taxonomy and builds on a vast number of empirical studies demonstrating its reliabilities and validities in diverse fields, including entrepreneurship (Şahin et al, 2019). Due to the Five-Factor Model's status as the "scientific standard" (Paleczek et al, 2018) we apply it in this study.…”

Mixed Associations Between Grit and transformational Leadership Behavior

“…Similarly, leaders’ traits have been shown to predict their self‐reported behavior, and their traits have been shown to predict followers' ratings of the leaders' behavior; however, those two effects do not always align (Colbert et al, 2012; de Vries, 2012: McKee et al, 2018). For example, Hautala (2006) found that leaders’ extraversion predicted their self‐reported leadership, while Paleczek et al (2018) found that leaders' sensing preferences (and not extraversion) predicted followers' ratings of leadership. In contrast, Brandt and Laiho (2013) found that the same leader trait predicted both self‐reported and follower‐rated behavior.…”