What You See Is Not What You Get: Social Skill and Impulse Control Camouflage Machiavellianism

Abstract

Recent studies found that social skill can transform negative workplace outcomes from dark triad traits (e.g., narcissism, psychopathy) into positive outcomes. Going one step further, we hypothesized that social skill would effectively mask Machiavellianism with dire consequences for organizations and coworkers if additionally combined with high impulse control in target Machiavellians. We tested our hypotheses in a triangular multisource design in two complementary workplace samples comprised of both target workers and coworkers with a total of N = 1,438 participants. In Sample 1, we found that high political skill and impulse control effectively masked and reinforced Machiavellians’ image building at work. The results of Sample 2 showed that when tenure was high, individuals high in Machiavellianism, political skill, and impulse control reported exponentially increased levels of counterproductive work behavior. Thus, what coworkers see is not what organizations and coworkers get in the long run. Implications and limitations are discussed.