Are There Unexplained Financial Rewards for the Snakes in Suits? A Labour Market Analysis of the Dark Triad of Personality
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12269 |
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
| Author | Joanne Kathryn Lindley |
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/bjir.12269
56:4 December 2018 0007–1080 pp. 770–797
Are There Unexplained Financial
Rewards for the Snakes in Suits?
A Labour Market Analysis of the Dark
Triad of Personality
Joanne Kathryn Lindley
Abstract
The Big Five personality test is used to generate psychopathy, narcissism
and Machiavellianism scores using a large UK individual level micro dataset.
These scores show that high levels of narcissism and Machiavellianism can be
associated with a higher incidence of employment in managerial occupations,
while high levels of psychopathy are related to higher employment in the
other services sector. The article finds a wage premium to Machiavellianism
that is largest at the 90th percentile, over and above all productivity-related
explanations. The average hourly wage increase for a one-point move up the
Machiavellianism scale is around 2.1 per cent.
1. Introduction
Economists have become increasingly interested in quantifying the labour
market returns to non-cognitive skills and personality traits (Heckman and
Kautz 2012). Yet, there is a dearth of information on the incidence and
implications of socially aversive personalities within the industrial relations
literature. One reason for this is a shortage of data. Publically available
data that contain labour market information alongside the relevant questions
required to identify such individuals do not exist. Consequently, this article
makes a number of important contributions to the existing industrial
relations literature. First, it is the first study to use the Big Five personality
taxonomy from a publicallyavailable large UK datasource to predict socially
aversive personality measures. Second, it is the first study to investigate how
these predicted measures relate to the labour market and to quantify any
Joanne Lindley is at King’s Business School, King’s College London.
C
2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Are there Unexplained Financial Rewards for the Snakes in Suits? 771
unexplained wage premiums or penalties associated with these personality
traits.
The Dark Triad of personality (psychopathy, narcissism and
Machiavellianism)demonstrate low scores for agreeablenesswhile at the same
time scoring high on emotional stability (Jonason et al. 2013). They are also
associated with being manipulative, exploitative and untrustworthy. If high
scoring Dark Triad workers earn more than their colleagues for reasons that
cannot be explained through productivity-related characteristics, then this
could be generating a direct cost to organizations that arise as a consequence
of their duplicitous behaviour. There may also be indirect costs to the firm
through their anti-social behaviour towards other co-workers, since there is
evidence in the organizational psychology literature that counterproductive
work behaviours are higher among some socially aversive personality types
(Grijalva and Newman 2015).
An economist might argue that any unexplained pay premium would arise
as a consequence of excess demand for such workers. But if Dark Triad
behaviouris duplicitous, this is more dicult to explain through marketforces,
since such mechanisms rely on perfect information. Therefore, identifying
unexplained wage premiums to workers with socially aversive personalities
might be thought of as unveiling previously asymmetric information. This
is of particular interest to employment relations scholars, given the financial
implications for organizations when they evaluate and promote individuals.
Organizations would be in a better position to hire workers and bargain over
wages if they could surreptitiously and accurately measure the integrity of
their workers.
The article starts with a review of the existing empirical literature on
the workplace behaviour of Dark Triad workers and the financial returns
to the Big Five personality traits. Section 3 then describes the econometric
methods used in the article. Section 4 derives measures for the Dark Triad
personality constructs using student data, and Section 5 describes the labour
market characteristics of workers who score relatively highly in psychopathy,
narcissism and Machiavellianism using micro-survey data. We then estimate
the financial returns to Dark Triad scores in Section 6 and present our
conclusions in Section 7.
2. Background literature
In this section, we review some important findings from the psychology
literature on the performance of the Dark Triad in the workplace, followed
by evidence from the industrial relations literature on the financial rewards to
personality traits. Paulhus and Williams(2002) devised the ter m ‘DarkTriad’
to highlight the shared ‘dark’ features of these traits. Their paper was followed
by a surge of Dark Triad publications in the psychology literature. Furnham
et al. (2013) summarize this literature.
C
2017 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
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