Charming, fearless, and manipulative people have a knack for climbing the corporate ladder. While those traits can help someone land a management role, they are also hallmarks of psychopathy, leaving employees to deal with the day-to-day reality of working for a self-serving boss.
Previous research has established that working under a leader with psychopathic tendencies is linked to higher emotional exhaustion, lower job satisfaction, and a stronger desire to quit. Yet very little is known about whether these bosses actually drag down how well their employees do their jobs.
A new study published in Psychology of Leaders and Leadership investigates how a manager’s psychopathic traits relate to their subordinates’ job performance. Conducted by Jasmine Vergauwe of Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Bart Wille of Ghent University, the research shows that while overall leader psychopathy is tied to worse employee performance, breaking the condition down into specific traits reveals that some aspects of psychopathy are harmful while others can actually be beneficial, depending in part on the employee’s own personality.
The good, the bad, and the ugly of dark leadership
In the workplace, psychopathy is often treated as a single, uniformly toxic trait. Prior to this investigation, only one known study had looked at whether manager psychopathy was linked to employee performance, and it found no connection when asking workers to rate their own output.
Vergauwe and Wille suspected that treating psychopathy as a single score might obscure what is really happening between bosses and their staff. To get a clearer picture, they turned to the triarchic model of psychopathy, a psychological framework that divides psychopathy into three distinct dimensions: boldness, disinhibition, and meanness.
Boldness captures a person’s social confidence, persuasiveness, fearlessness, and ability to stay calm under pressure. Disinhibition refers to poor impulse control, recklessness, a lack of long-term planning, and difficulty following rules. Meanness involves a lack of empathy, cruelty, arrogance, and cold-heartedness toward others.
Because these three dimensions trigger very different behaviors, organizational researchers sometimes refer to boldness, disinhibition, and meanness as the good, the bad, and the ugly of psychopathy. Vergauwe and Wille wanted to see how each of these three traits related to employee performance, and whether an employee’s own personality changed how they responded to their boss.
Measuring bosses and their employees
To test their ideas, the researchers recruited 581 business leaders across Belgium from industries including retail, information technology, food, education, and government. The leaders had an average age of 48, nearly 25 years of work experience, and oversaw at least three subordinates.
Each leader completed a self-assessment measuring their levels of boldness, disinhibition, and meanness. They also evaluated one of their employees across three distinct categories of job performance: task performance (how well the employee handles core job duties and maintains high standards), contextual performance (cooperative behaviors like helping coworkers without being asked), and adaptive performance (how well the employee handles stress, unexpected problems, and uncertain situations).
Next, the researchers reached out to the employees being evaluated, gathering personality data from 475 matched subordinates who had worked under their respective bosses for an average of more than six years. These employees completed standard questionnaires measuring three major personality traits: agreeableness (how warm, trusting, and cooperative a person is), conscientiousness (how organized, disciplined, and goal-oriented they are), and neuroticism (how prone they are to anxiety, stress, and emotional ups and downs).
How different traits link to workplace output
When the researchers looked at the leaders’ overall psychopathy scores as a single measure, they found a negative association with employee task performance and adaptive performance. In general, the higher a boss scored on overall psychopathy, the worse their employee performed in their core duties and in unpredictable situations.
However, analyzing the three dimensions of psychopathy separately revealed opposing patterns. Leader meanness was linked to lower employee scores across all three performance categories, while leader disinhibition was linked to lower task and adaptive performance.
The researchers explain these negative links through the give-and-take nature of workplace relationships, which rely on mutual trust, fairness, and respect. When a leader is cold and dismissive (high in meanness) or reckless and unreliable (high in disinhibition), they break that social contract, and employees may respond by pulling back their effort and disengaging from their work.
Leader boldness, on the other hand, showed the exact opposite pattern. Bosses who scored higher in boldness rated their employees as having higher task, contextual, and adaptive performance. The authors suggest that a manager who remains composed under pressure and projects strong social confidence can inspire confidence in their team, encouraging employees to reciprocate with higher commitment and effort.
Where employee personality fits in
Because leadership is a two-way relationship, Vergauwe and Wille also examined whether the match between a boss’s psychopathic traits and an employee’s personality influenced job performance. Psychologists call this concept person-supervisor fit, which can work in two ways: two people might click because they share similar values and working styles, or they might work well together because one person’s strengths make up for the other’s weaknesses.
For leader meanness, the employee’s personality did not change the outcome at all. Working for a callous, unempathetic boss was associated with lower performance regardless of whether the subordinate was agreeable, conscientious, or neurotic.
When it came to leader disinhibition, highly conscientious employees took the biggest hit. For workers who scored high in conscientiousness, having an impulsive, disinhibited boss was strongly linked to worse adaptive performance, whereas less conscientious workers showed no significant drop. The researchers note that organized, detail-oriented employees rely on clear rules and dependable structure, making it especially frustrating for them to adapt to uncertain situations when their boss acts erratically and ignores long-term planning.
The benefits of leader boldness also varied depending on who was being led. For instance, leader boldness was linked to better adaptive performance among employees who scored low in conscientiousness, while highly conscientious employees did not see that boost. In addition, the link between leader boldness and task performance pulled in opposite directions depending on whether the employee was high or low in agreeableness, suggesting that warm, cooperative workers may not respond as well to a dominant leader as more skeptical, thick-skinned employees do.
One finding ran directly counter to what the researchers initially predicted. They had expected that highly neurotic, anxious employees would clash with bold leaders and perform worse, yet the data showed that neurotic employees actually had higher adaptive performance when working for a bold boss.
Vergauwe and Wille interpret this surprise result as a case where a leader’s traits offset an employee’s vulnerabilities. Because employees high in neuroticism often struggle with self-doubt and stress during unpredictable situations, a bold leader who projects fearlessness, emotional stability, and clear direction may act as a stabilizing buffer, helping anxious workers navigate changing demands.
Takeaways and caveats for organizations
For businesses, the findings indicate that treating dark leadership traits as a single category can be misleading. While organizations have good reason to watch out for antagonism and poor impulse control in managers, traits associated with boldness, such as stress tolerance and social confidence, may help employees perform well under certain conditions.
At the same time, the researchers caution companies against using these findings to match managers and employees based on personality tests. Out of the 27 personality combinations tested in the study, only four proved to be statistically significant, and the size of those effects was small, meaning these personality dynamics should be viewed as preliminary patterns rather than a blueprint for building teams.
Several methodological limitations also apply to the results. Because the study captured data at a single point in time, it cannot prove that a leader’s traits directly cause changes in employee performance. In addition, because the leaders rated both their own psychopathic traits and their subordinates’ job performance, the findings could partly reflect how different types of bosses perceive and grade their staff rather than objective differences in output.
