Why dark personalities can get ahead: Extending the toxic career model

Publication date: 1 April 2020Source: Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 156Author(s): Mareike Kholin, Bastian Kückelhaus, Gerhard BlickleAbstractLow honesty-humility is a broad indicator of the common core of dark personality traits. The toxic career model explains how dark personalities successfully climb the organizational ladder. It suggests that dark personalities can get ahead at work via self- and other-rated political skill, which results in improved job performance ratings by supervisors. We extended this mediation model by adding targets’ hierarchical organizational position. Additionally, we specified two moderating conditions that can explain how individuals with low and high honesty-humility can get ahead. First, enterprising job characteristics facilitate higher self-other agreement regarding political skill, thereby promoting the rise of individuals low in honesty-humility. Second, high honesty-humility compensates for low other-perceived political skill. We successfully tested the moderated-mediation hypotheses from the extended toxic career model in a multi-source design with 203 target-peer-supervisor triplets.
Source: Personality and Individual Differences - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research