Upsides to Dark and Downsides to Bright Personality: A Multidomain Review and Future Research Agenda

Abstract

It has become common practice to refer to personality traits as being either bright or dark, and a wealth of research has provided support for the effects of both bright traits and dark traits in organizations. This research has largely focused on explaining the downside of dark traits and the upside of bright traits. However, a recent trend has emerged in which scholars are challenging the long-standing convention that bright traits are always beneficial and dark traits are always detrimental. Instead, novel research has begun to explore the potential upside of dark traits and downside of bright traits. In this review, we adopt a multidomain perspective—integrating work from organizational behavior, human resources, strategic management, and entrepreneurship—to highlight this growing body of research. Specifically, we focus on the work advancing our understanding of the complexity of personality, such as identifying situations in which dark traits may be advantageous or beneficial and detecting curvilinear effects that suggest too much of a bright trait may be disadvantageous. Furthermore, we provide a brief discussion on special considerations for the measurement of both bright and dark traits and close with a series of avenues for future research.

Are followers satisfied with conscientious leaders? The moderating influence of leader role authenticity

“…For example, our study relied on a global measure of conscientiousness, though post hoc tests suggested that examining lower order dimensions of conscientiousness may shed additional light on the main relationships. To this end, we echo others in noting that trait measures designed to capture narrower subfacets may provide meaningful clarity (e.g., Roberts et al, 2005;Smith et al, 2018). We likewise note that our study found a complex relationship between leader conscientiousness and followers' shared satisfaction with the leader (i.e., a team-level construct).…”

“…Heeding calls in related research (Hough, 1992;Roberts, Chernyshenko, Stark, & Goldberg, 2005;Smith, Hill, Wallace, Recendes, & Judge, 2018), we conducted supplementary analyses to explore whether examining leader conscientiousness at the subfacet level might further inform our model. 4 Although our hypotheses did not specify first-order dimensions of conscientiousness, our arguments did imply that leader role authenticity acts as a hedge against conscientious leaders' tendencies to pursue order, which then affects their adaptability.…”

Measurement and research using the Big Five, HEXACO, and narrow traits: A primer for researchers and practitioners

“…When honesty‐humility is reversed, it is almost synonymous with measures of the Dark Triad (Aghababaei, Mohammadtabar, & Saffarinia, ; Lee & Ashton, ). Thus, the inclusion of honesty‐humility aligns with recent interest in dark personality (Smith, Hill, Wallace, Recendes, & Judge, ). The HEXACO model may also be particularly useful in employee selection settings (Anglim, Morse, De Vries, MacCann, & Marty, ; Hough & Connelly, ) where organisations seek to identify job applicants who are more likely to engage in bullying, theft, and other counterproductive work behaviours.…”

Machiavellianism and Bullying Behavior: Conditional Effects of Trait Activating Job Roles and Mediating Mechanism of Impression Management: A Region Based Study

“…Personality research has been emerged as a backbone in main stream OB research. Investigation of traits are becoming way complex than it was investigated previously (Smith, Hill, Wallace, Recendes, & Judge, 2018). Nowadays, the theoretical perspectives focus on investigating the deceptive, manipulative and opportunistic traits such as Machiavellianism (Carter, Guan, Maples, Williamson, & Miller, 2016).…”

“…It is not recommended by the researchers to investigate the linear personality-outcome relationships because of their complexities. Hence, there is a need to figure out the person's intents and the underlying interventions for investigating personality associations (Smith, Hill, Wallace, Recendes, & Judge, 2018).…”