Poor Mental Health at Work!
Guest blog post from Dave Wilkinson
Think about a person who is your worst nightmare as an employee. What traits make them a nightmare for you?
There are just some combinations of personality attributes and traits which, when they fall together, form an unattractive or even dangerous combination.
One such combination is called the dark triad. Knowing about the dark triad can help you prevent very costly recruiting mistakes.
What is the dark triad?
In short it is the perfect storm of three personality attributes which come together to create a deeply manipulative and callous individual, who can often hold the appearance initially (especially during first contact situations such as recruiting) to be personable, intelligent and thoughtful individuals.
The three traits are Narcissism, Machiavellianism and Psychopathy. Narcissism and Psychopathy are actually considered to be personality disorders.
I will look at each of these, what they are and what to look for.
Narcissism
Narcissistic individuals have a tendency for elevated pride in themselves and their achievements, a heightened level of egotistic behaviour. They take pleasure from self-admiration and the admiration of others. Indeed they will flatter people who admire them and detest people who don’t, polarising their responses.
They have a tendency to think they are perfect or that only they can do a good job. The other side of this is they are usually hypersensitive to criticism and negative feedback, which they will tend to take as an insult.
They also tend to have problems maintaining positive relationships, partially at least because narcissists tend to have problems with empathy. This means that they can be nightmares as managers as they will often make decisions without no thought about the impact on the individuals affected. Even if the impact is drawn to their attention, it is likely they will prefer the efficiency of the decision rather than incorporating the needs of others.
Additionally, they tend to exploit people and are usually bad at setting and maintaining personal boundaries. They will expect people to be just like they are and not understand differences or diversity of approaches.
Machiavellianism
Machiavellianism is a term used by psychologists to denote a person who is unemotional and is therefore detached from the normal moral and ethical decision making processes that most of us have.
As a result Machiavellian people have little or no compunction about lying and manipulating others, usually to their own ends. They are often described as having ‘cold selfishness’, and they are very unlikely to consider the impact of their behaviour on anyone other than themselves. Studies have shown that Machiavellianism is strongly related to a number of counter-productive and deviant behaviours in the workplace including power seeking, manipulative and team-destructive behaviour.
Psychopathy
Psychopathy has three major components:
Boldness or high levels of self-confidence and fearlessness, particularly in interpersonal and social situations which other people would usually find inhibiting.
Poor impulse and behaviour control. This means that people with psychopathic tendencies will often go for their own instant gratification in situations in which others would be inhibited.
Meanness. Psychopaths lack empathy and lack the feelings of attachment that the rest of us have. However they are often intelligent and can easily mimic behaviours of others, leading them to assume they have a closer relationship than is actually the case. Psychopaths are considered to be notoriously amoral, without the usual personal and social checks and balances that foster pro-social behaviour. They are not team players.
A study in 1994 found that about 1% of the population could be clinically described as falling within the definition of being a psychopath. In a paper published in 2007 entitled ‘Snakes in suits: When psychopaths go to work’ researchers found that approximately 3-4% of senior managers fall within the clinical definition of being a psychopath with all the resultant implications. This figure of senior management having psychopathic tendencies, being 4 times the incidence of the general population shows the power seeking need of these individuals. Such managers and leaders tend to engage in toxic abusive and destructive management practices.
The Dark Triad
When these three dark triad traits come together, and particularly when they are coupled with intelligence, they tend to produce individuals who can appear to be highly successful however they are callous and highly manipulative. They can come over as charming, particularly to people in power like their own management or recruiters, however will become abusive and hard once that individual loses their relative power. So for instance they will be personable and attentive to recruiters during the recruiting process, but once they have attained their position will easily turn on the recruiters or at the very least become dismissive of them
As they are so manipulative it is difficult to spot and weed out these people. It is, however, important to do so as they can be inherently destructive in organisations and can often cause other good staff to leave or to suffer undue stress. At senior level, such people can destroy a company and even create a situation that ends in the criminal courts. Organisations have a duty to protect their staff and recruiters have a duty to protect the organisation.
A good recruiter will be looking for the telltale signs.
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