Three Nightmare Traits in Leaders

Introduction

Interest in leadership traits and the relations between leader personality and leadership styles has waxed and waned over the decades, following the rise and fall in popularity of situational (nurture) and behavioral genetic (nature) explanations of personality and leadership. Although most researchers nowadays adopt an integrated ("nature in nurture") stance, models that integrate personality traits, leadership styles, and situations that account for ­– or can counter ­– the activation of personality traits and leadership styles, are still rare. This is especially true when considering the dark side of personality and leadership. Although ­– especially in the wake of several high-profile corporate scandals (e.g., Enron, WorldCom, Volkswagen) ­– a burgeoning field of research on dark personality traits and dark leadership styles has emerged, these two fields of research remain by-and-large separate.

As its main contribution the following review offers a theoretical, empirical, and practical integration of personality and (dark) leadership research (1) by proposing that they can ­– and should ­– be integrated by conceptualizing leadership styles as contextualized personality, (2) by introducing the so-called "Three Nightmare Traits" ­– i.e., dishonesty (low honesty-humility), disagreeableness (low agreeableness), and carelessness (low conscientiousness) ­– as an overarching conceptualization of dark side personality and leadership, (3) by using the Situation-Trait-Outcome Activation (STOA) model as a framework to explain the effects of TNT leaders on, in, and through situations, and (4) by providing recommendations for organizations how to deal with TNT leaders in different career stages using an extended Attraction-Selection-Attrition model.

Although most of this review will focus on the TNTs among leaders (hereafter referred to as "TNT leadership"), one of the core assumptions of this review is that leadership styles can be interpreted as contextualized personality traits. That is why, before focusing on the TNT leadership, the following section offers a more general explanation of why there is reason to assume that all leadership styles ­– not only those that are related to the TNT ­– can be considered contextualized personality traits.