UBC-led research reveals why some managers deliberately hire ‘dark-triad’ employees
New Canadian-led research is shining a light on an uncomfortable truth: when managers’ own advancement comes first, a small but significant group are willing to back employees even when they know are manipulative and unethical.
In a new paper in the Journal of Managerial Psychology, co-author Karl Aquino, professor of organizations and society at the UBC Sauder School of Business, and his colleagues report that some managers favourably evaluate subordinates who have “dark-triad” (DT) personality traits.
These managers will hire and promote these individuals because they see them as helpful for their own goals, especially when those goals are self-advancing rather than communal.
Why some leaders choose ‘dark’ employees
Aquino says the team wanted to understand how often leaders truly prefer these employees – and what kind of leader makes that choice.
To move beyond the idea that dark-triad staff mainly get in by hiding their traits, Aquino and his co-authors told the study participants exactly how candidates behaved, including examples of duplicitous or unethical conduct, and found some managers still willing to select them.
Aquino says those managers look very different from the average leader.
“In general, leaders generally prefer the non-DT employees over DT employees. However, if a leader really prioritizes agentic [self-benefiting] goals, then the preference flips,” he says, adding that while not common, a specific preference for DT employees does show up in certain circumstances.
“It can happen, and may be more likely in certain situations, such as when the leader wants someone to do a difficult task that may inflict harm on some employees.”
‘Necessary evils’ and agentic managers
Across the study sample, most managers still favour candidates described as prosocial and “conventionally moral.”
But among the small subset of leaders whose agentic goal scores are extremely high – more than three standard deviations above the mean – the model predicts that the balance can tip toward preferring a dark-triad subordinate, particularly when the task involves potential harm to others
These “necessary evils,” Aquino says, include tasks such as firing or disciplining other employees.
The research links these preferences to managers’ goals, finding that leaders who are strongly focused on agentic goals, such as personal advancement and maintaining power, are more inclined to favour dark-triad subordinates. Dominance-oriented leaders, who rely more on intimidation and power to influence others, also tend to report higher agentic goal motivation and lower communal goal motivation.
Conversely, “prestige-oriented” leaders, who prioritize ethics, mentoring and employee well-being, are less inclined to do so.
When dark traits seem useful at work
In the paper, “dark” personality is defined more broadly as a tendency to maximize one’s own gain while disregarding or even provoking harm to others, supported by beliefs that justify that behaviour.
The authors note that these traits are associated with more workplace deviance and counterproductive work behaviour, as well as lower colleague-rated performance overall.
However, Aquino points to places in an organization where those tendencies can look useful to a results-driven leader.
“These traits exist for a reason, and they can be functional or beneficial in certain situations,” he says, especially when a leader “wants to hire someone who does the dirty work, has to make the decisions that are difficult and then be willing to take the heat for it.”
In a supplemental study described in the paper, participants read a scenario about a leader who wanted to mandate COVID19 vaccines for all employees and fire everyone who did not comply.
The leader in the vignette wanted “to avoid being seen as the bad guy,” the paper notes, and in that situation, participants in general preferred a dark triad employee over the non-DT employee to carry out the terminations.
What HR and employers should watch for
For Canadian HR and people leaders, the research underlines that dark triad employees are often present because someone in authority sees them as useful, not just because a hiring process has failed: “People may very well be aware that some of their employees have these traits,” Aquino says.
The research also highlights the importance of understanding what individual managers are optimizing for when they push for a particular hire or to protect a particular “star.” Managers’ goal profiles – not just their own dark traits – predicted how positively they evaluated dark-personality subordinates, and those associations held after controlling for similarity based attraction.
Aquino’s work cautions against assuming that all such employees are being smuggled in under the radar. Instead, the findings point to the need for governance that looks at who is being hired into which roles, how necessary evils are assigned and overseen, he says, and whether a small number of highly agentic leaders are quietly shaping pockets of culture around themselves.
“It's hard to say that you should categorically eliminate or try to select out these kinds of people,” Aquino says.
“First of all, it's difficult. And, second, it may be that these traits can actually be, at least from the standpoint of the manager, helpful for achieving them their goals.”
