Understanding the Performance Effects of “Dark” Salesperson Traits: Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and Psychopathy

Link: https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429221113254

What makes a good salesperson? Hiring managers and academics have largely focused on positive personality traits and performance drivers, but have ignored the importance among salespeople of negative traits such as the dark triad (DT)- Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy.

That these dark personalities are employed by sales organizations suggests the ability of some salespeople to mask the dysfunctional manifestations of DT traits, such as callous self-interest, with more functional ones, such as charisma, during the hiring process. DT traits can offer significant advantages for some salespeople to get ahead and secure longer tenures. But there are downsides in the long run, too. Overtime, the self-interested, antagonistic behaviors associated with DT traits are likely to undermine their relationships with colleagues, diminish their social capital, and subsequently reduce their performance.

This brings up two questions for Chief Sales Officers:

(1) how dark salespeople perform over time relative to their low DT peers and (2) how ambient social structures, such as organizational social networks into which salespeople are embedded, influence these salespeople’s performance.

A new paper in the Journal of Marketing examines these questions in two studies. The first study provides empirical evidence that narcissism and psychopathy allow dark salespeople to succeed in the short term, but eventually lead to a “fall from grace,” including lost performance gains. In contrast, Machiavellianism produces little in the short term but manifests in long-term  performance benefits.

The second study investigates how reach efficiency, a measure for how fast information about one’s actions becomes socially visible to others (i.e., friends of friends), changes the DT salespeople’s performance. Results show that when reach efficiency is high, narcissism and psychopathy lead to decreased sales performance in subsequent periods. On the other hand, those with Machiavellianism benefit from high reach efficiency, which results in enhanced performance in subsequent periods.

The findings offer three key recommendations for Chief Sales Officers:

• Hiring managers should be trained specifically to recognize signs of DT traits in the interview process using tools such as behavioral questions that highlight past or potential behaviors and characteristics typical of dark personalities.
• Sales managers should be trained to be cognizant of the performance patterns that may signal a dark personality to determine if interventions are needed.
• Sales managers should leverage social networks and peer feedback to facilitate unmasking dark personalities.