Most people have worked alongside someone who seemed to treat the office like a chessboard, or a colleague so hungry for praise that any criticism sparked a sulk. These personalities can make a workplace feel tense. But a question that gets less attention is what happens inside those employees. Do the same traits that unsettle a team also push the people who hold them toward the exit?
A study published in the European Journal of Management, Economics and Business examines that question among bank employees in Iraq. It looks at how three difficult personality traits relate to an employee’s intention to withdraw from work, and whether a feeling of disconnection from the job helps explain the link.
The traits under the microscope
The research centers on what psychologists call the Dark Triad, a cluster of three related but distinct personality traits. The first is Machiavellianism, marked by a cynical, calculating, and manipulative approach to relationships. The second is psychopathy, associated with impulsiveness, thrill-seeking, and a shortage of empathy or guilt. The third is narcissism, characterized by grandiosity, entitlement, and a strong need for admiration.
The study draws on what researchers call the Dark Factor of Personality, or D Theory. This framework suggests these three traits share a common root: a tendency to put one’s own interests ahead of others, even at their expense. The idea is that this self-serving core sits uneasily with the cooperation most workplaces depend on.
The author, Ali Isam Al-Soltane of the University of Al-Qadisiyah in Iraq, focused on two outcomes. One is “withdrawal intentions,” meaning an employee’s desire to leave the organization or pull back from the workload. The other is “work alienation,” described as a psychological state in which an employee feels disconnected from their work, their colleagues, and the organization, along with a sense of powerlessness and meaninglessness.
Al-Soltane points out that most Dark Triad research has come from Western settings, leaving a gap in emerging economies. He also notes that while the outward effects of these traits on teams have been studied at length, the inner experience of the people carrying the traits, and how that experience feeds a wish to quit, has received less attention.
How the study was built
The research surveyed 392 employees in the private banking sector across three Iraqi governorates: Qadisiyah, Muthanna, and Babylon. Participants needed at least six months of experience at their organization to take part.
To reduce a common problem in survey research, where answers given at a single sitting can artificially inflate the connections between them, the author used a time-lagged design. Employees reported their personality traits at one point in time. Then, after a gap, they reported their sense of work alienation and their intentions to withdraw. Separating the measurements this way is meant to produce more dependable results.
The personality traits were measured with a 12-item questionnaire known as the Dirty Dozen, which covers all three traits. Work alienation was measured with a 10-item scale, and withdrawal intentions with a 3-item scale. All answers were given on a 7-point agreement scale.
To analyze the data, Al-Soltane used a statistical technique called Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling. In plain terms, this method lets a researcher test how several factors relate to one another at the same time, including chains where one factor is linked to a second, which is then linked to a third. It is well suited to predicting an outcome, in this case the desire to withdraw.
What the numbers showed
Two of the three traits behaved as the author expected. Machiavellianism and narcissism were each directly linked to stronger withdrawal intentions. Al-Soltane connects this to the idea that Machiavellian employees view a job as a transaction and lose interest once it stops serving their goals, while narcissistic employees may feel slighted when the organization fails to deliver the constant validation they expect.
Psychopathy produced a surprise. Its direct link to withdrawal intentions was negative rather than positive, and only weakly so. In other words, employees higher in psychopathy were, if anything, slightly less inclined to say they wanted to leave. The author suggests these individuals may stay in roles that offer rewards, authority, or opportunities to manipulate others, and that their emotional detachment could make them less sensitive to the dissatisfaction that normally drives people out.
All three traits were linked to higher work alienation. And work alienation itself was strongly connected to withdrawal intentions. Employees who felt disconnected and powerless were more likely to want out.
The role of feeling disconnected
The heart of the study is the chain running from personality to alienation to the urge to leave. Here the author tested whether work alienation acts as a link in the middle.
For all three traits, that indirect path was present. Each trait was tied to greater alienation, and that alienation was in turn tied to a stronger desire to withdraw. For Machiavellianism and narcissism, the author describes this as a partial explanation: those traits relate to withdrawal both directly and through the alienation they produce.
Psychopathy is the most telling case. Its direct link to withdrawal was negative, yet its link to alienation was clearly positive, and that alienation pushed withdrawal intentions upward. Al-Soltane interprets this as a complete explanation through alienation. In his reading, psychopathy does not make employees want to leave on its own. Instead, it fosters a sense of disconnection, and it is that disconnection that raises the odds of wanting to go.
The model accounted for roughly 47 percent of the variation in work alienation and about 40 percent of the variation in withdrawal intentions, levels the author describes as moderate for this kind of behavioral research.
What it might mean for employers
Al-Soltane suggests that banks and similar organizations could benefit from personality screening during hiring, along with programs designed to reduce work alienation and keep employees engaged. If the internal feeling of disconnection is what most directly precedes the wish to leave, then addressing that feeling could help retention.
Several caveats deserve attention. The study is observational, so it describes associations rather than proving that one thing causes another, even with the time-lagged design. The findings come from one industry in one country, and the author frames the emerging-economy setting as a feature worth studying rather than a basis for broad generalization. A handful of the work alienation survey items performed somewhat below the usual statistical benchmarks, though the author reports the overall measures met accepted standards. And the negative result for psychopathy was weak, which the author himself flags as something that may need to be re-examined in future work.
What the study offers is a more detailed picture of how difficult personality traits connect to the desire to quit, with the sense of feeling cut off from one’s work sitting in the middle of that story.
