The Dark Triad in the Workplace

While most psychopaths are thought to be in prison, there are a majority in corporate and political sectors.  Psychopaths can be charming, confident, fearless, bold, interpersonally dominant, have low anxiety, reckless and dishonest.  Psychopaths' central features are manipulation, deceitfulness and being dishonest.  

Personality has been found to be an important predictor of work performance and other work-related outcomes, and there is a positive relationship between personality and workplace outcomes and  experience.  As such, there has been a shift to discussing transformational leadership and employee engagement  at work to dark leadership at work.  Psychopaths at work has been linked to fraud, undertaking unethical decision-making, put-down and abuse coworkers, and have insatiable desire for rewards and status meaning that they will go at anything to get it including lying about their qualification and work history. 

Dark leadership includes personalities within the dark triad which includes Machiavellian (are cynical, detached emotionally, strategic long term planning, manipulative, exploits others and deceptive), narcissism (inflated sense of self-view, believes they are successful and seeks admiration, wants to have their self-love reinforced by others, fantasies control), and psychopaths (charismatic, emotionally shallow, lacks remorse or concern for others). 

While people who have the dark personalities may be risk takers, are strategic, great communicators and thrive for power, status and success even though if it is at the expense of others and workplace cohesion, may become counterproductive, are only great communicators to manipulate others and when they don't get what they want become abusive, and sabotage whey they can't control or gets in their way.  Moreover, while Machiavellian personalities are recruited for high power positions due to their strong personality and assertiveness, they ultimately will become cynical to others, unreliable, unpredictable, have a disregard for standards, and threatening. 

People with dark personalities in the workplace can have positive qualities when things go their way however may become destructive when they don't.  Therefore, personality and workplace outcomes are important to measure when hiring people and understanding productive workplace behaviours. 




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