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Keywords: dark triad, psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellism, psychological contract
Abstract
Psychological contracts - an individual's perception of mutual obligations between him/herself and an organisation - form a powerful lens to understanding employment relationship. While the consequences of the psychological contract are well-documented, its antecedents are not fully understood. Research suggests that personality traits, operationalised using the Big Five taxonomy, can explain the type of psychological contract that employees develop. We extend this research by developing a theoretical model that relates three maladaptive traits - the dark triad of personality: Machiavellism, narcissism, and psychopathy - to the content of employees' psychological contracts. We propose that employees with high scores on these traits tend to develop transactional as opposed to relational psychological contracts. Moreover, we introduce five mediators to explain these relationships: the norm of reciprocity, careerism, perceived organisational support, trust, and interpersonal conflict. Finally, we offer an explanation for earlier suggestions of curvilinear effects of the dark triad traits. We reason that psychopathy and narcissism negatively relate to self-control which, in turn, moderates the relationships between the dark triad traits and the six mediators in our model.
Introduction
Every so often, popular media ascribe fraudulent and deviant behaviour of employers and employees to dark personality traits. For example, when the ENRON Corporation went bankrupt in 2001, media soon focussed on the CEO, Kenneth Lay, who appeared to have deceived and manipulated people for years on end (Suddath, 2010). He was depicted as the archetype of the "corporate psychopath" because he enriched himself while driving his organisation and its employees into the ground. However, attention for dark personality traits in the workplace is not limited to popular media as scholarly attention for this topic is on the rise (Furnham, Richards, & Paulhus, 2013). In 2002, Paulhus and Williams introduced the dark triad of personality, a constellation of three related yet distinct traits: Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. More than a decade later, the dark triad has been empirically related to mostly negative outcomes, such as counterproductive work behaviour (O'Boyle, Forsyth, Banks & McDaniel, 2012) and manipulative and 'hard' influence tactics (Jonason, Slomski & Partyka, 2012). Notwithstanding these advancements in the literature, it remains unclear how employees characterised by the dark triad are able to function in employment relationships.