“Not all psychopaths are in prison – some are in the boardroom. If I hadn’t been able to study psychopaths in prison, I could have gone to the stock market.” These are the words of Robert Hare, a famous clinical psychologist who created The Psychopathy Checklist, one of the most widely used tools of its kind in the world.
The psychopathy Hare mentions is part of a set of traits described by psychologists as the “dark triad”: narcissism, machiavellianism and psychopathy.
Narcissism means an acute sense of one’s own importance and worth. A certain level of narcissism can be harmless and even healthy. But when things constantly happen at the expense of others, narcissism becomes a problem. At work, for example, a person who considers themselves special and smarter than everyone else can calmly take credit for somebody else’s work.
Machiavellianism is characterized by deceptive and manipulative behaviors, put into practice to achieve personal goals. Machiavellians are those people who, for example, to get a promotion, can lie and sacrifice everything, including their relationships with colleagues.
Psychopathy involves self-centeredness, cruelty, and lack of remorse, as well as impulsive behavior.
At work, the dark triad correlates positively with higher positions in an organization’s hierarchy and higher salaries. Why? It seems that these traits stimulate competition, seduction, and intimidation tactics (of bosses, competitors, etc.), and focus on the goal. Also, a narcissist will have more self-confidence and more courage to act, and this will bring advantages both to him and to the company. In the long run, however, everything is detrimental to the group – studies show a significant association between this type of personality and counterproductive behaviors at work (absenteeism, bullying, sabotage).
Below are some behaviors that you should pay attention to when you observe them at work. The goal is not to make a spontaneous diagnosis at the office (they can’t even be enough to characterize someone as a narcissist, for example) but to act so that a person’s negative traits do not affect you / do not affect the dynamic the team.
- Refusal to share knowledge (information, procedures, etc.) with others
- Fierce and constant criticism of any approach made by colleagues
- Impulsive, unethical, rule-breaking actions
- Aggressive reaction to uncomfortable feedback
- Differentiated treatment of others according to the hierarchy
- Threats to others
- Vindictive behavior
