Dark personality traits fuel unethical workplace behavior, but incivility is not the trigger many expected

Some of the most damaging acts in modern organizations are not acts of sabotage against the company. They are violations committed on the company’s behalf: bending rules to close a deal, misrepresenting data to protect a manager, deceiving a client to defend the firm’s interests. Psychologists call these unethical pro-organizational behaviors, and a new study published in BMC Psychology suggests that the employees most prone to them can be identified, in part, by the darker corners of their personalities. Surprisingly, however, the hostile social climate many researchers assumed would amplify these tendencies turned out to be largely irrelevant.

Gülçin Eren of Istanbul Bilgi University and Serdar Bozkurt of Yıldız Technical University surveyed 312 white-collar employees from private sector organizations in Istanbul, collecting data between January and April 2024. Their goal was to untangle a chain of influence that organizational psychology has been assembling for years: how dark personality traits relate to the willingness to voice disagreement inside the organization, how those traits relate to unethical acts committed for the organization, and whether workplace incivility—the everyday rudeness of ignored emails, condescending remarks, and exclusionary glances—acts as a situational trigger that converts dispositional risk into actual misconduct.

The theoretical engine behind the study is trait activation theory. The framework holds that personality dispositions do not express themselves uniformly across all situations; they surface when the environment supplies cues relevant to the trait in question. A competitive, aggressive setting, for instance, should make traits like callousness and manipulativeness more behaviorally consequential than a calm, cooperative one. Workplace incivility, the researchers reasoned, could function as exactly such a cue: a chronic, low-intensity signal of interpersonal hostility that might make the behavioral tendencies of employees with dark traits more pronounced. If true, the practical implications would be substantial, because incivility is one of the most common and most studied forms of mistreatment in working life.

The Dark Triad was measured both as a composite and at the level of its three constituent facets. Narcissism captures grandiosity, entitlement, and a need for admiration. Machiavellianism reflects strategic manipulation, cynicism, and a calculating orientation toward others. Psychopathy denotes callousness, impulsivity, and low empathy. The study also distinguished between two channels through which dark traits might express themselves. Organizational dissent, measured with a scale capturing both vertical dissent voiced to superiors and horizontal dissent voiced to peers, represents the expression of disagreement within the organization. Unethical pro-organizational behaviors, in contrast, represent rule-breaking and deception performed in the organization’s service. The two outcomes are conceptually distinct: one is a form of voice, the other a form of misconduct, yet both could plausibly be fueled by the same dispositional core.

The results confirmed the first part of the chain. Dark personality traits, considered as a composite, were significantly and positively associated with both organizational dissent and unethical pro-organizational behaviors. Employees who scored higher on the dark composite were more likely to voice disagreement inside the organization and more likely to report having engaged in unethical acts on the organization’s behalf. At the facet level, the picture became more textured. Psychopathy was unrelated to organizational dissent, whereas Machiavellianism and narcissism were both positively related to it. All three facets—psychopathy included—were positively related to unethical pro-organizational behaviors. The dissociation is telling: the impulsive, callous component of the Dark Triad appears to fuel misconduct without necessarily fueling the structured expression of disagreement, while the more strategic and socially oriented components fuel both.

The moderation results, however, defied the researchers’ expectations. Workplace incivility did not significantly moderate most of the relationships examined. The only interaction that reached conventional significance was borderline and treated as provisional: the association between psychopathy and unethical pro-organizational behaviors was stronger under higher levels of workplace incivility. In other words, among employees with psychopathic tendencies, chronic rudeness in the workplace appeared to intensify the link between disposition and misconduct. But the authors are explicit that this single significant interaction, among the many tested, should be interpreted with caution and replicated before it is treated as a reliable boundary condition.

The largely null moderation findings are themselves informative, the researchers argue. They suggest that interpersonal mistreatment, at least as measured here, does not readily function as a boundary condition for personality-behavior associations. The dispositional risk carried by dark traits appears to translate into dissent and unethical pro-organizational behavior across a range of social climates, not only in the hostile ones. This directs attention to other contextual candidates—ethical climate, leadership style, organizational structure—that might serve as more effective moderators. It also challenges a popular intuition: that dark traits only become dangerous when the environment is hostile. The data suggest the danger is more constant than that.

The study’s conclusions carry practical weight for organizations. Rather than relying solely on exclusionary recruitment decisions—screening out candidates with dark traits, an approach with its own ethical and legal complications—the authors recommend strengthening ethical organizational climates, promoting supportive leadership practices, implementing behavioral risk management strategies, and providing appropriate employee development interventions. The point is not that dark traits can be neutralized, but that organizations can reduce the potential risks associated with them by shaping the conditions under which all employees, including those with dispositional vulnerabilities, make decisions.

The findings also refine how organizations should think about voice. Organizational dissent is not inherently pathological; it can be a constructive channel for improving practices. But the study suggests that employees with Machiavellian and narcissistic tendencies are more likely to engage in it, which raises the question of whether their dissent serves organizational improvement or personal advantage. Distinguishing between these motives in practice is difficult, but the dissociation between dissent and misconduct at the facet level—psychopathy fueling misconduct without fueling dissent—suggests that the two outcomes are driven by partially different dispositional mechanisms and should be managed separately.

Ultimately, the study frames behavioral outcomes as arising from the interplay between individual tendencies and organizational conditions, while acknowledging that personality is one of several correlates of work attitudes and behaviors. The interplay, in this case, appears to be less conditional than trait activation theory might predict: dark traits expressed themselves in dissent and unethical pro-organizational behavior regardless of the level of incivility employees reported experiencing. The one provisional exception—psychopathy amplified by incivility—offers a thread for future research to pull. For now, the message for organizations is that the risk associated with dark personality traits is not waiting for a hostile climate to activate it. It is already present, and it must be managed through the ethical architecture of the organization itself.

Subject of Research: Psychology

Article Title: Examining the moderating role of workplace incivility in the relationship between dark personality traits, organizational dissent, and unethical pro-organizational behaviors

Article References: Eren, G., & Bozkurt, S. (2026). Examining the moderating role of workplace incivility in the relationship between dark personality traits, organizational dissent, and unethical pro-organizational behaviors. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05640-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05640-w

Keywords: Dark Triad, workplace incivility, organizational dissent, unethical pro-organizational behavior, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, narcissism, trait activation theory, organizational psychology, business ethics, Examining, moderating