Vocational interests and dark personality
Personality has consistently been related to vocational interest (occupation).
Who works where and why?
Are there ways to predict what personality works best in order to perfect the recruitment process?
Science has sunk it´s teeth in this for almost a decade by now, but only a few have looked at the dark sides of personality. If you follow this blogg you are aware by now that NGr measures not only personality but also the anti-social sides of personality, something that has shown to be just as important if not even more important.
Many individuals, mainly managers, will not show ability for narcissism, psychopathy and machiavellism if you do standard testing. (Traits that you definitely will not find during a standard interview). These abilities can be disastrous for your business if you accept someone with strong such features into your organization.
Kowalski, Vernon and Schermer (2016) set out 7 hypothesis about how dark side personality correlated with vocational interests.
Using the Jackson Career Explorer (JCE) and its seven factors they looked for correlations.
The seven factors according to the JCE are:
1. Business (dominant leadership, finance, business, sales, supervision, human resources management, law, and professional advising)
2. Work style (job security, stamina, accountability, academic achievement, independence, planfulness, and interpersonal confidence)
3. Science (mathematics, physical science, engineering, and life science)
4. Social (social science, personal services, teaching, social service, and elementary education)
5. Artistic (creative 44 C.M. Kowalski et al. / Personality and Individual Differences 104 (2017) 43–47 arts, performing arts, author-journalism, and technical writing)
6. Applied (skilled trades, family activity, and office work)
7. Biology (adventure, nature-agriculture, and medical service)
The results shows that
Narcissism correlated positively with the artistic, social, biology, and business interest factors and with many of their associated scales.
Machiavellianism correlated negatively with the social, applied, and work style factors.
Psychopathy correlated positively with the science, biology, and business interest factors, and was negatively correlated with the social and work style factors.
The implications of the study is two folded as we see it at NGr.
For once it is important knowledge to know what dark trait to look for in different vocational choices.
But also, based on the Next Generation Report, look for what dark trait (cause we all got ´em to different extent) might be a better fit.
The dark traits of our personality only gets problematic as they exceed what the rest of the population is used to handle (whats "normal")
So a small dose of Narcissism works well for a CEO, but only if it is considered within the scope of what´s "normal".
