Problematic personalities in teams: Implications for performance trajectories and resilience to unexpected change

Abstract

Despite the well‐established importance of team composition, there has been relatively little research that focuses on compositions regarding problematic personality traits. This study examines the impact of Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism—all operationalized as team composition variables—on team cooperation and performance over time. This was done in a sample of 43 graduate student teams (n = 269) engaged in an immersive business simulation that unfolded over a 6‐week duration. In addition, the parameters of the simulation task were altered midway through the simulation without forewarning, in turn creating a shock event that allowed for an examination of whether team composition for negative personality had similar effects under conditions of business‐as‐usual versus a disruptive change. Results indicated that both team average Machiavellianism and sadism had deleterious effects on team cooperation and performance over time, while controlling for two closely associated positive personality traits (honesty‐humility and agreeableness). These damaging effects were further revealed to especially detract from performance trajectories after teams experienced a disruptive event. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of including problematic personality traits in considerations pertaining to team composition.

Validation of cooperative and competitive interactive tasks in dominant and subordinate sibling pairs.

“…Meta-analyses highlight that agreeableness and conscientiousness are positively related to team performance (for an overview see 81,82 ). Not surprisingly, Machiavellianism and dominance seem to be negatively associated with team performance and team cooperation 50,51,83 . Teams formed by largely dominant or leader-type people significantly performed worse on a collaborative task 50 .…”

“…Machiavellianism, dominance, and hypercompetitiveness are each evidenced by manipulative, aggressive, deceitful, and exploitative behavior, regardless of the extreme harm to opponents or damage to others. These personality traits are intercorrelated 45,[47][48][49] , associated with lower cooperation in collaborative tasks 50,51 and game theory tasks (for an overview see 42 ), and linked to higher competitive and aggressive behavior in competitive contexts 52 .…”

Reciprocal relationships between narcissism and agentic versus communal work activities across the first 6 years of the career.

“…Narcissism was assessed at each wave using the Short Dark Triad (SD3; Jones & Paulhus, 2014), which is a frequently used measure in organizational literature (e.g., Bernerth et al, 2022; Dierdorff & Fisher, 2022; Fehr et al, 2020). Although this instrument provides scores on all three dark triad traits (i.e., narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy), the present study only focusses on SD3-narcissism which is measured using the nine SD3-items rated on a 5-point Likert scale whereby 1 = strongly disagree and 5 = strongly agree .…”

Status acuity: The ability to accurately perceive status hierarchies reduces status conflict and benefits group performance.

“…First, the additive model is one of the most common and validated “variable-centered” approaches (Emich et al, 2021) for studying the group-level effects of individual characteristics (Bell, 2007; LePine et al, 2011; Prewett et al, 2009), including cognitive ability (Bell, 2007; Ellis et al, 2003; LePine, 2003; Woolley et al, 2010), emotional intelligence or social sensitivity (Druskat & Wolff, 2001; Jordan & Troth, 2009; Woolley et al, 2010), personality traits (Chiu et al, 2016; Courtright et al, 2017; LePine, 2003; Xu et al, 2019), psychopathy, dark triad, implicit aggression (Baysinger et al, 2014; Dierdorff & Fisher, 2021; Grijalva et al, 2020), decision style (Zhu et al, 2020), and value orientation (Cheng et al, 2012). Like this existing work, we focus on groups working on interdependent tasks, where productivity should be positively related to the summed abilities of members (Tziner & Eden, 1985) such that “more is better” (Mathieu et al, 2013), making additive aggregation most appropriate (Barrick et al, 1998; Homan et al, 2008; LePine et al, 2011).…”