Anatomy of a Workplace Asshole

How the “Dark Triad” of Personality Traits Drives Bad Behavior

In “The Performance-Values Matrix,” I argued that the biggest reason company culture degrades is that companies hire, retain, and promote “assholes” (mercenary employees whose lack of empathy causes interpersonal issues). I also introduced the Performance-Values Matrix as a reinforcement system to assess and address this very problem. Let’s now dive deeper into a clinical understanding of “asshole” behavior and how it can be carefully managed in a corporation.

Part I: Anatomy of an Asshole (The Dark Triad)

“Asshole” is not a term I use clinically or scientifically, but rather commonly because it provides a shared understanding of something you “know when you see it.” My goal here is to offer insight into and clearly categorize a pattern that you probably intuitively recognize.

Clinically, there are three distinct types of socially aversive personality traits, known as the “Dark Triad”: psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. These traits are dimensional in the sense that all of us fall somewhere on the spectrum, but only those who are very high in the trio of traits can be considered diagnosable with antisocial personality disorder. If you’re curious, you can take the online…