The dark core and leaders : leaders self-reported personality and workplace behaviours

Abstract

Using a recently developed measure of the Dark Core at Work (DCW) I had two objectives in my research. First, based on a sample of 302 leaders, I aimed to establish a relationship between leaders’ scores on the DCW scale and organizationally relevant outcomes (e.g., toxic leadership). Second, I assessed whether the DCW scale provided incremental prediction in organizationally relevant outcomes compared to an established measure of the Dark Tetrad at Work (DTW) and the H-H scale of the HEXACO. I found that the DCW was related to all organizational outcomes except for organizational citizenship. Further, the DCW accounted for incremental variance above and beyond the H-H subscale and the DTW scales for all outcomes except for organization oriented organizational citizenship behaviours. Establishing a context specific measure of the Dark Core provides researchers of workplace behaviour with a measure to assess the Dark Core at work.