Leadership and Personality: Dark Traits, FFM, and Paradoxes

Person x Situation Paradoxes

  • Person x situation interactions are rife with paradoxes.
  • What might lead to fitness under one set of conditions might become a serious disadvantage in a different situation.
  • Despite these paradoxes, the overall FFM profile of effective leaders is clear: high extraversion, high openness, high conscientiousness, low neuroticism, and low agreeableness.

The Dark Traits

  • The FFM has proven to be a useful way to organize a myriad of different personality traits.
  • However, the FFM has been criticized for lacking comprehensiveness (Block, 1995; Eysenck, 1992; Paunonen & Ashton, 2001).
  • In particular, Costa and McCrae’s FFM has been criticized for not adequately capturing the so-called dark traits (e.g., Smith et al., 2018; Conrad, 2020).
  • Costa and McCrae’s FFM tends to focus on morally and ethically neutral characteristics.
  • There are two influential “dark trait” taxonomies:
    1. The Dark Triad (Paulhus & Williams, 2002):
      • Psychopathy (subclinical)
      • Machiavellianism
      • Narcissism
    2. The Dark Tetrad (e.g., Paulhus, 2014; which added a fourth dark trait):
      • Sadism

Characterization of The Dark Tetrad

  • The traits of the Dark Tetrad have been characterized in the following way (e.g., Plouffe et al., 2017):

    • Psychopathy (subclinical): antisocial tendencies, a lack of empathy, impulsive thrill-seeking, erratic behavior, and charm.
    • Machiavellianism: a cynical worldview in which cunning, manipulation, deceit, flattery, etc., are used to further one’s own interests.
    • Narcissism: a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, sense of entitlement, and a lack of empathy.
    • Sadism: a dispositional tendency to engage in exploitative, cruel, demeaning, or aggressive behaviors for pleasure or dominance.

  • Scores on the Dark Tetrad covary, suggesting some underlying commonality or higher-order factor (Plouffe et al., 2017):

    • Bivariate correlations for the Dark Tetrad:
      • Psychopathy and Sadism: 0.66
      • Machiavellianism and Psychopathy: 0.51
      • Machiavellianism and Sadism: 0.32
      • Narcissism and Psychopathy: 0.36
      • Narcissism and Machiavellianism: 0.39
      • Narcissism and Sadism: 0.23

Correlations with FFM and HEXACO

  • FFM Correlations:
    • The Dark Tetrad share a common core of disagreeableness (e.g., Plouffe et al., 2017).
    • Narcissism and psychopathy correlate with extraversion and openness.
    • Machiavellianism and psychopathy are negatively associated with conscientiousness.
    • Psychopaths tend to be low on neuroticism.
    • Correlations of the Dark Tetrad with Agreeableness:
      • Psychopathy: −.33-.33
      • Machiavellianism: −.26-.26
      • Narcissism: −.20-.20
      • Sadism: −.33-.33
  • HEXACO Model:
    • The Dark Tetrad are better captured in Ashton and Lee’s HEXACO 6-factor model, which includes an Honesty-Humility dimension.
    • Correlations of the Dark Tetrad with Honesty-Humility:
      • Psychopathy: −.59-.59
      • Machiavellianism: −.53-.53
      • Narcissism: −.51-.51
      • Sadism: −.41-.41

Evolutionary Perspective

  • Ashton and Lee (2007) argue that long-run mutual cooperation, or reciprocal altruism, is beneficial to both parties involved.
  • However, they suggest two potential reasons as to why this reciprocal altruism might be unstable:
    • First, if there is the perception that one might successfully exploit other parties for personal gain.
    • The Honesty-humility domain is defined (inversely) by dark traits that assess the tendency to exploit others by subtle manipulation or by more direct fraud and to feel entitled and motivated to profit by exploiting others.
    • Second, if there is the perception that one might be being exploited by other parties.
    • The agreeableness domain is defined (inversely) by traits that assess reactions to the perception that one is being exploited by others, where those reactions may be expressed as a defensive posture during negotiations and as a low threshold for evaluating others’ actions negatively or critically.

Dark Traits and Leadership

  • The dark traits have obvious relevance for predicting criminal behavior, but there is also a burgeoning line of research looking at the dark traits and leadership (e.g., Campbell et al., 2011; Dilchert et al., 2014; Smith et al., 2018).
  • Leadership entails the ability to influence the attention, values, thinking, and emotions of subordinates and followers, including what frightens them and inspires them for good or for bad (Yukl, 2013).
  • From an evolutionary perspective, the dark traits represent an evolved strategy for survival and reproductive success which relies on the creation of inhibitory and submissive compliant states in others.
  • The major constituents of dark motivation and behavior revolve around advancing self-interest through self-promotion, intimidation, shaming, manipulation, unethical behavior, and signals of threat (Gilbert & Basran, 2019).

Dark Traits: Leadership Emergence

  • The dark traits are positively correlated with leadership emergence.
  • Individuals with dark personality traits are effective at positioning themselves for future leadership opportunities (Grijalva et al., 2015; Owens, et al., 2015; Paunonen et al., 2006), and others readily promote them to leadership positions within organizations (Hiller & Hambrick, 2005; Hogan & Hogan, 2001).
  • For example, Machiavellians tend to have a high motivation to lead (Mael et al., 2001).
  • They are also adept at navigating organizational politics to achieve positions of power (Dingler-Duhon & Brown, 1987; Corzine, 1997; Dahling et al., 2009).

Dark Traits: Leadership Effectiveness

  • In terms of leadership effectiveness, though, the dark traits are associated primarily with leadership failure.
  • Hogan and Hogan (2001) argue the dark traits are all concerned with behaviors that alienate subordinates and prevent leaders from building a team – which is a defining feature of leadership.
  • A number of meta-analyses highlight positive associations with undesirable workplace outcomes such as counterproductive work behaviors, abusive supervision, unethical behavior, and job stress (e.g., Greenbaum, Hill, Mawritz, & Quade, 2017; Grijalva & Newman, 2015; O’Boyle et al., 2012; Wille et al., 2013; Wu & LeBreton, 2011).
  • Furthermore, dark traits have been found to negatively relate to integrity and ratings of performance (Blair, Hoffman & Helland, 2008; Dahling, Whitaker, & Levy, 2009; Mathieu, 2013; Mathieu, Neumann, Hare, & Babiak, 2014; Michel & Bowling, 2013; O’Boyle et al., 2012; Smith, Wallace, & Jordan, 2016; Wille et al., 2013).
  • Conversely, it has been suggested that the dark traits may be beneficial in certain situations.
  • Several authors have argued that dark traits are associated with higher levels of adaptive or agentic behavior (Petrenko, et al., 2016; Judge et al., 2009).
  • For instance, narcissists may be more adept at working in changing or chaotic environments and when interacting with an audience (Grijalva & Harms, 2014).

Concluding Comments

  • Meta-analytic studies reviewing the literature on the FFM and leadership effectiveness suggest a multiple R value of around .40
  • Together the five personality dimensions of Costa and McCrae’s model can account for about 16% of the variance in leadership effectiveness.
  • But this multiple R value is almost certainly a gross underestimate of the true strength of the relationship between personality and leadership effectiveness:
    • Correlational analysis is a test of linearity. If two variables are related in a non-linear fashion (e.g., curvilinear) the correlation coefficient will seriously underestimate the true strength of the relationship.
    • The trait of boldness for example is likely to be related to leadership effectiveness in a curvilinear way (i.e., very low scores and very high scores on boldness are likely to be associated with less effective leadership (Ames and Flynn, 2007)
  • Research seldom considers interactions between different personality dimensions.
  • For instance, does the relationship between extraversion and leadership effectiveness change as a function of a person’s level of conscientiousness?
  • Extraversion might be positively correlated with leadership effectiveness when conscientiousness is high but negatively correlated with effective leadership when conscientiousness is low.
  • Researchers do not include this kind of interaction variable in their regression models, and it is likely that these interaction terms would explain additional unique variance in leadership effectiveness.
  • Research using the FFM seldom considers the additional variance in leadership effectiveness that can be explained by narrow personality traits.
  • Bandwidth-fidelity dilemma: when you discard narrow trait (level 3) measures and focus exclusively on dimensional (level 4) measures you lose information.
  • Paunonen and Ashton (2001) argue that the highest level of behavioral prediction is achieved by using both broad dimensions (to capture common variance) and narrow traits (to capture specific variance).
  • Paunonen and Ashton (2001) found that beyond the “Big Five” dimensions, the inclusion of carefully selected narrow traits increased the predictive accuracy for a range of socially important criteria (e.g., tobacco consumption, attending parties, willingness to share money) by about 8% on average.
  • The inclusion of theoretically relevant narrow traits is likely to be of particular importance in the field of leadership, as the theoretically relevant narrow traits that need to be considered in predictive modeling are the dark tetrad, yet it is precisely these dark traits that are missing from the FFM.