Almost everyone has had a manager who made the workday harder than it needed to be. Some bosses belittle their teams in meetings. Others quietly take credit for work they did not do, or behave in ways that feel cold and self-serving. Research has long shown that these kinds of supervisors tend to drive people out the door and wear down their mental health. A less-examined question is why some employees seem to weather a difficult boss better than others.
A study published in Psychology of Leaders and Leadership looked at one possible answer that may sound counterintuitive: whether workers who themselves score high on so-called “dark” personality traits are better equipped to handle a toxic supervisor. The researchers found evidence that these traits offered a partial shield, but only against certain kinds of harm.
The question behind the research
Most studies of bad leadership focus on the leader. Alexis Hanna of the University of Nevada, Reno, along with Daniel N. Jones at the same institution and Peter W. Hom of Arizona State University, wanted to shift attention to the people on the receiving end. Their starting point was a body of work suggesting that personality shapes how individuals respond to a hostile manager.
The authors built their investigation around the “Dark Triad,” a cluster of three related personality traits often studied together. Machiavellianism describes a calculating, manipulative, and cynical outlook. Narcissism involves entitlement, a strong need for power, and high self-assuredness. Psychopathy is marked by callousness, impulsiveness, and a tendency to lie. People can score high or low on each, and the traits exist on a spectrum across the general population rather than being all-or-nothing.
To explain why these traits might matter, the researchers drew on a framework called conservation of resources theory. The basic idea is that people are motivated to protect things they value, including tangible resources like income, but also personal ones like self-esteem and confidence. A toxic boss tends to drain those resources, which is part of why such supervision is so damaging. The authors reasoned that someone high in Dark Triad traits might hold onto their personal resources more easily in a hostile environment, because their worldview and emotional makeup leave them less rattled by a manager’s bad behavior.
How toxic supervision was measured
The team treated toxic supervision as having three parts rather than one. The first, abusive supervision, covers openly hostile behavior like putting someone down in front of others. The second, exploitative supervision, captures self-serving actions that are not openly hostile, such as taking credit for an employee’s work. The third, psychopathic supervision, captures dispositions like constant lying or dismissing others’ pain. The authors argue that measuring all three gives a fuller picture than studying abusive behavior alone.
The researchers recruited participants through a Qualtrics panel, ending with 231 full-time employees who each had a direct supervisor. The sample was relatively varied in age, race, income, and tenure. To check whether participants were rating their bosses accurately rather than simply venting, the team also asked each participant to forward a survey to a coworker who could rate the same supervisor. Those coworker ratings lined up closely with the participants’ own, with correlations around 0.8 across all three dimensions, which the authors took as a sign the ratings were trustworthy.
Participants also completed a questionnaire about their own personality, covering the three Dark Triad traits, and answered questions about their intention to quit, their psychological distress, their mental well-being, and the quality of their relationship with their leader, a measure researchers call leader-member exchange. Three months later, participants were asked whether they had received a raise or a promotion. About 106 people responded to this follow-up.
What the analysis revealed
The first set of results confirmed the familiar damage. Toxic supervision was linked to higher quit intentions, more psychological distress, and a worse relationship with the supervisor. Two findings ran against the researchers’ expectations. Toxic supervision was not significantly tied to lower well-being, and it was actually associated with more career advancement, not less.
The heart of the study was whether employees’ Dark Triad traits changed these patterns. Here the picture split cleanly in two.
For the positive outcomes, all three traits acted as a buffer. Employees who scored high on narcissism, Machiavellianism, or psychopathy reported better mental well-being, more career advancement, and a higher-quality relationship with their leader under toxic supervision than employees who scored low on those traits. In other words, the same hostile boss appeared to take less of a toll on these workers, and in some cases their careers moved forward.
For the negative outcomes, the traits offered no protection. Workers high in the Dark Triad still reported strong intentions to quit and high psychological distress when reporting to a toxic boss. The authors read this as a sign of how powerful resource loss is: nearly everyone wanted to leave a toxic supervisor, regardless of personality.
One trait broke from the pattern in a telling way. Among employees high in psychopathy, toxic supervision was tied to even stronger intentions to quit than among other workers. The researchers suggest this may reflect the impulsiveness associated with psychopathy. Even when these employees were gaining advantages like promotions, they may have been quicker to want out.
How to make sense of the findings
The researchers offer some interpretation of why dark traits might function as resources. Someone high in Machiavellianism, they suggest, may stay focused on strategic, bottom-line goals while others around them grow emotional. Someone high in narcissism may draw on stable self-confidence when a boss withholds recognition. And because all three traits involve a cynical or self-focused view of other people, a toxic boss may simply confirm what these employees already expect from the world, sparing them the jolt that a more trusting person feels.
The authors also noticed that employees high in Dark Triad traits tended to rate their supervisors as more toxic in the first place. They float the possibility that people with these traits may project their own outlook onto others, a pattern sometimes called consensus bias. They are careful to note this does not explain why the same employees still fared better on well-being and advancement.
Practical takeaways and caveats
The researchers are explicit that they are not recommending anyone become more callous or manipulative to cope with a bad boss. Instead, they suggest that some non-toxic features connected to these traits might be cultivated by ordinary employees. Building self-confidence through skills training or development programs, for example, might supply some of the self-assuredness that appears to help narcissistic employees. Keeping a strategic focus on doing the job well and advancing one’s career might serve as an emotional buffer in the way it seems to for those high in Machiavellianism.
For organizations, the authors point to a blunter lesson. Because every group of employees reported more distress and stronger intentions to quit under toxic supervisors, they recommend that companies regularly survey workers about their managers as a way to detect and address the problem early.
Several limits are worth keeping in mind. Most measures were collected at a single point in time and relied on self-reports, aside from the coworker checks on supervisor behavior, which means some of the links could be inflated. The follow-up on career advancement reached fewer than half the original participants. And the design cannot establish cause and effect, so it is more accurate to say that dark traits were associated with better outcomes than to say they produced them. The authors also acknowledge they could not fully verify that an independent coworker, rather than the participant, completed the second survey. They frame their results as a step toward understanding employee resilience rather than a final word on how to survive a difficult boss.
