Portrait of a workplace deviant: A clearer picture of the Big Five and Dark Triad as predictors of workplace deviance.

Abstract

Despite the large and growing number of studies on workplace deviance, the field currently lacks a complete understanding of who perpetrates this behavior. In one stream of research, scholars have examined the relationship between more "traditional" personality traits (i.e., the Big Five, which consists of conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability, openness to experience, and extraversion) and workplace deviance. In an alternate stream, scholars have examined the relationship between workplace deviance and more malevolent personality traits (i.e., the Dark Triad, which consists of Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy). We synthesize these two perspectives using a meta-analytic approach to examine the incremental importance and relative importance of the Dark Triad beyond the Big Five for predicting workplace deviance. Our results supported our incremental importance hypothesis, as the Dark Triad predicted variance in both forms of workplace deviance beyond the Big Five. However, the results of the relative importance analyses were more nuanced, as agreeableness, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy were the most important predictors of interpersonal deviance, and conscientiousness, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy were the most important predictors of organizational deviance. Overall, our results make a contribution by explicating the relative effects of employee personality domains to paint a clearer picture of a workplace deviant.