Daniel Spurk

Who they are

Spurk is a researcher whose paper used on this site sits in research on careers and personality. The sources read for this publication are the paper's publisher record and repository summary, which give the study and its authors but no biography, so this page does not state an institution, post or career history. It records what the paper establishes and leaves the rest blank rather than supplying it from memory.

His co-authors on the study are Anita Keller and Andreas Hirschi. The paper is a collaboration and its findings belong to the three of them. This site names Spurk as the first author because the article Do Dark Triad Traits Help at Work follows the convention of crediting the first author of a study.

Key papers

Do bad guys get ahead or fall behind? Relationships of the Dark Triad of personality with objective and subjective career success (Spurk, Keller and Hirschi, 2016), Social Psychological and Personality Science, 7(2), 113-121. doi:10.1177/1948550615609735.

The sample was 793 early-career employees in Germany, representative for age and education and drawn from the private sector. Dark triad traits were measured by self-report, with the Dirty Dozen, a twelve-item scale. The outcomes were monthly pre-tax salary, holding a leadership position and career satisfaction. The analyses used multiple and logistic regression and controlled for gender, age, job tenure, organisation size, education and working hours.

Key ideas

Each trait relates differently to career outcomes. Narcissism was positively related to salary. Machiavellianism was positively related to leadership position and career satisfaction. Psychopathy was negatively related to every outcome analysed. The authors conclude that the dark triad has both bright and dark sides in careers, which is a reason not to treat the three traits as a single score.

The design limits the reading. The study is correlational and the traits are self-reported, so it does not show that narcissism raises pay. It covers early-career workers in one country, and the repository summary read for this publication does not report a narcissism result for leadership position or career satisfaction, so none is stated here.

The result sits beside, not against, the meta-analytic evidence on conduct. The same publication's article sets this study next to a 245-sample meta-analysis by Ernest O'Boyle and colleagues, which found all three traits linked to more counterproductive work behaviour. The two measure different outcomes.

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