Three Nightmare Traits in Leaders
Read this article to examine research conducted on the dark side of leadership. The author concentrates on leadership styles using the construct of personality. He uses a framework of various factors, including emotionality, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, to examine the negative effects of dishonesty, disagreeableness, and carelessness. Be attentive to the paragraph on psychopathic leaders. There is also a discussion about what organizations should do to prevent the rise of TNT (Three Nightmare Traits) leaders. Some thought that people with TNT tend to apply to work at organizations that have a culture that encourages certain behaviors.
Three Nightmare Traits in Leaders
This review offers an integration of dark leadership styles with dark personality traits. The core of dark leadership consists of Three Nightmare Traits (TNT) – leader dishonesty, leader disagreeableness, and leader carelessness – that are conceptualized
as contextualized personality traits aligned with respectively (low) honesty-humility, (low) agreeableness, and (low) conscientiousness. It is argued that the TNT, when combined with high extraversion and low emotionality, can have serious ("explosive")
negative consequences for employees and their organizations. A Situation-Trait-Outcome Activation (STOA) model is presented in which a description is offered of situations that are attractive to TNT leaders (situation activation), situations that activate
TNT traits (trait activation), and the kinds of outcomes that may result from TNT behaviors (outcome activation). Subsequently, the TNT and STOA models are combined to offer a description of the organizational actions that may strengthen or weaken the
TNT during six career stages: attraction, selection, socialization, production, promotion, and attrition. Except for mainly negative consequences of the TNT, possible positive consequences of TNT leadership are also explored, and an outline of a research
program is offered that may provide answers to the most pressing questions in dark leadership research.
Source: Reinout E. de Vries, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00871/full
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