Do Dark Triad Traits Help at Work
Dark triad scores went with higher pay in one German sample and with worse job performance across 245 samples. Narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy do not move together at work, and pay, rank, performance and conduct each point in a different direction. The evidence supports a narrow claim about getting ahead and none about doing the job better.
Answer to the question
Do dark triad traits help at work?
Not in general. Narcissism went with higher pay and Machiavellianism with leadership position in one German sample, but a 245-sample meta-analysis tied all three dark triad traits to more counterproductive behaviour. Narcissism predicts who becomes a leader, not who leads well.
Key takeaways
- O'Boyle and colleagues (2012) pooled 245 samples and 43,907 people: all three dark triad traits went with more counterproductive work behaviour, and Machiavellianism and psychopathy went with lower job performance.
- Spurk and colleagues (2016) studied 793 early-career employees in Germany: narcissism went with higher salary, Machiavellianism with leadership position and career satisfaction, and psychopathy with lower scores on all three.
- Grijalva and colleagues (2015) found narcissism tied to who emerges as a leader, explained by extraversion, but not to leadership effectiveness rated by observers.
- Furnham's Dark Triad entry in The New Psychology (pp. 57 to 61) treats the traits as subclinical and quotes a 2021 critique warning that the Tetrad and Pentad overexpand the dark cluster.
- Most of this work rests on self-report scales such as the twelve-item Dirty Dozen, and the studies are correlational.
Adrian Furnham says there is "plenty of evidence" that dark triad scores mean trouble at work. A German study found narcissists earned more.
Both statements hold. The three traits act on different outcomes, and a pooled analysis of many samples shows a different pattern from a single large one. The dark triad is the grouping of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy, proposed in 2002 by Delroy Paulhus and a co-author because the three overlap: each involves self-promotion, emotional coldness, duplicity and aggressiveness. The grouping describes ordinary variation in non-clinical people, not a diagnosis. Furnham, whose The New Psychology is the seed for this piece, notes that Machiavellianism is the only one of the three never treated as a clinical syndrome, more a belief about how people work (pp. 57 to 61).
Most workplace studies measure the dark triad by self-report, often with the Dirty Dozen, a twelve-item scale. A dark triad score is therefore what a person says about themselves, which matters for every finding below. Furnham traces the construct's lineage through the DSM-IV Cluster B personality disorders and Hogan and Hogan's cluster of working against people, which is why the vocabulary sounds clinical when the scores are not. The Tetrad later added sadism and the Pentad spitefulness.
Who got paid more and who got promoted?
The German sample, studied by Daniel Spurk and colleagues, offered three career outcomes to set against dark triad scores: monthly pre-tax salary, holding a leadership position and career satisfaction. They controlled for gender, age, tenure, organisation size, education and working hours. Narcissism was positively related to salary. Machiavellianism was positively related to leadership position and career satisfaction. Psychopathy was negatively related to all three.
The three traits did not move together.
| Trait | Pay, rank and satisfaction (793 employees) | Conduct and performance (245 samples) |
|---|---|---|
| Narcissism | Higher salary | More counterproductive behaviour |
| Machiavellianism | Leadership position, career satisfaction | More counterproductive behaviour, lower performance |
| Psychopathy | Lower on all three | More counterproductive behaviour, lower performance |
The authors concluded that the traits have bright and dark sides, from a correlational design that cannot show that narcissism causes higher pay.
Pay, rank, performance and conduct have each gone in a different direction.
What changes across 245 samples?
Pooling 245 independent samples published between 1951 and 2011, a meta-analysis led by Ernest O'Boyle found the picture darker. Machiavellianism and psychopathy were linked to lower job performance. All three traits were linked to more counterproductive work behaviour, meaning conduct that harms the organisation or its people, and authority and culture moderated those links.
Furnham reports the same direction with a mechanism for each trait. Machiavellians distrust that extra effort will be repaid, narcissists think rules of reciprocity do not apply to them, and the callousness in psychopathy makes them less likely to help others. His summary of the pattern is plain, and the mechanisms are his reading of it. How individual traits add up inside a team is a separate question, and [Is Collective Intelligence Real](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/is-collective-intelligence-real) asks whether a group has an ability of its own.
Leadership gives narcissism its best case, and a 2015 meta-analysis by Emily Grijalva and colleagues separates two things the case blurs. Narcissism was positively related to leadership emergence, meaning who ends up in the role, and the authors found that leader extraversion explained that link. It showed no relationship with leadership effectiveness when supervisors, subordinates and peers did the rating. Self-rated effectiveness did rise with narcissism. The authors also found a curved pattern behind the flat line and read it as an optimal, moderate level of narcissism.
A review of what the field calls successful psychopathy, by Scott Lilienfeld and colleagues, adds a further wrinkle. People high in psychopathic traits who had professional success tended to score higher than unsuccessful ones on assertiveness, excitement-seeking and conscientiousness, which says which traits travel with success and nothing about whether the dark triad pays.
Which outcome, and who rated it?
A 2021 critique that Furnham quotes at length warns that proposals for new dark traits rest on little or no theory and may "overexpand the dark cluster until the label is no longer meaningful". Its target is the Tetrad, which adds sadism, and the Pentad, which adds spitefulness. The point is a case of the jingle-jangle fallacy, different names for the same thing, and [Grit Is Mostly Conscientiousness](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/grit-is-mostly-conscientiousness) makes the same complaint about a different pair of labels. We agree with it on the additions and not on the original three, which have a large literature behind them as a shorthand.
A claim that dark triad traits help people get ahead needs four answers before it can be weighed. The first is which of the three traits is meant, since in the German sample psychopathy went the opposite way to the other two. The second is which outcome is counted, because pay, rank, performance and conduct have each gone in a different direction. The third is who did the rating, since observers and the leaders themselves disagreed on effectiveness. The fourth is whether the dark triad measure is a self-report score, as it is in most of this work, and whether it measures what it claims to, the question [The Office That Stopped People Talking](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/the-office-that-stopped-people-talking) puts to self-reported sickness absence.
With those answered, the evidence supports a narrow claim. Narcissism and Machiavellianism have each been tied to being paid or promoted, and in the studies reported here none of the three has been shown to improve how well the job is done.
Furnham adds three principles of his own.
Two of them are accounts of how the traits operate, not findings. One holds that narcissism works through high self-confidence, since communicating confidently increases persuasiveness, so that the dark triad becomes a cheater strategy that pays only while it is rare. Another holds that high scorers are drawn to high-risk, high-payoff niches, in his phrase like gambling for high stakes. Neither is tested in the studies above.
The third principle is that high scorers are more accurate in their perceptions because they are more agentic. That is an inference from worldly success to accurate perception, and the chapter cites no study for it.
Common questions
Do dark triad traits help at work?
Not in general. Narcissism and Machiavellianism have each been tied to pay or rank in one German sample, but a 245-sample meta-analysis linked all three traits to more counterproductive behaviour, and two of them to lower job performance.
Do narcissists earn more?
In one German sample of 793 early-career employees, higher narcissism scores went with higher monthly salary. The study is correlational and the traits were self-reported, so it does not show that narcissism raises pay.
Does narcissism make someone a better leader?
Not on the evidence in a 2015 meta-analysis. Narcissism was tied to who emerges as a leader, which extraversion explained, but not to leadership effectiveness as rated by supervisors, subordinates and peers.
Is the dark triad a diagnosis?
No. It groups three traits that vary across ordinary people, and Furnham describes it as subclinical. A score on a short scale is a self-description, not a clinical finding.
Sources
Paulhus, D. L., & Williams, K. M. (2002). 'The Dark Triad of personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.' Journal of Research in Personality, 36(6), 556-563. doi:10.1016/S0092-6566(02)00505-6
Jonason, P. K., & Webster, G. D. (2010). 'The Dirty Dozen: A concise measure of the Dark Triad.' Psychological Assessment, 22(2), 420-432. doi:10.1037/a0019265
Spurk, D., Keller, A. C., & Hirschi, A. (2016). 'Do bad guys get ahead or fall behind? Relationships of the Dark Triad of personality with objective and subjective career success.' Social Psychological and Personality Science, 7(2), 113-121. doi:10.1177/1948550615609735
O’Boyle, E. H., Forsyth, D. R., Banks, G. C., & McDaniel, M. A. (2012). 'A meta-analysis of the Dark Triad and work behavior: A social exchange perspective.' Journal of Applied Psychology, 97(3), 557-579. doi:10.1037/a0025679
Grijalva, E., Harms, P. D., Newman, D. A., Gaddis, B. H., & Fraley, R. C. (2015). 'Narcissism and leadership: A meta-analytic review of linear and nonlinear relationships.' Personnel Psychology, 68(1), 1-47. doi:10.1111/peps.12072
Lilienfeld, S. O., Watts, A. L., & Smith, S. F. (2015). 'Successful psychopathy: A scientific status report.' Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(4), 298-303. doi:10.1177/0963721415580297
Kowalski, C. M., Rogoza, R., Saklofske, D. H., & Schermer, J. A. (2021). 'Dark triads, tetrads, tents, and cores: Why navigate (research) the jungle of dark personality models without a compass (criterion)?' Acta Psychologica, 221, 103455. doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2021.103455. Quoted in Furnham (2024).