How To Run a Healthy Business Rid of Toxic Employees
I will first show you the research about narcissists and Machiavellians and then tell you how and what to focus on that will increase value in any high-growth business and why.
Understanding what to look for and how to identify narcissists and Machiavellians in interviews or your employees including managers is an essential skill in running any type of business.
Unfortunately, most think it's too hard or they are afraid of taking responsibility for the employees and companies well being.
Hiring a toxic personality is harmful to the business
If you hire a narcissist or a machiavellian type the business will suffer in different ways.
The business will not foster a continuous learning culture.
The environment will become abusive.
Feedback and tolerance will be eliminated.
If you manage to identify narcissists, Machiavellians, and psychopaths who are sadistic, you can save yourself sleepless nights and the bankruptcy of the business.
The key is to make firm decisions to eliminate them from the business when they show the slightest indication. Because they are neurological disorders.
Let's dive in.
Narcissists hide information and play dumb
Focusing on identifying narcissistic managers and employees has a direct impact on continuous learning within a business.
When Yiyu Wang, Muhammad Waseem Bari, Sadia Shaheed, and Xiaoying Liu investigated Dark Triad personality types. Psychopaths, Machiavellians, and Narcissists: they found that narcissists were the only of the three that play dumb and evasively hide information from others.
This fact was back in 2023, also confirmed by Mahdi Salehi and Safoura Rouhi, who originally found that positive self-esteem(higher in extroversion than neuroticism) within audit firms share knowledge between auditors. When neuroticism is higher than extroversion, and they are narcissistic, they are reluctant to share knowledge within the business.
They further recommend always using psychological tests that are validated and can identify both a negative value between neuroticism and extroversion where neuroticism is higher and if they have a narcissistic personality that displays:
Entitlement
Superiority
Victimhood(neuroticism)
Vanity
One highly accurate test is the HEXACO test.
Perceived leaders are often narcissists
In 2023 researchers Zhuo Lo, Jennifer Lynch, Tianlu Sun, Qamara Rizkyana, Joey T. Chen, and Alex J. Benson in Canada researched power motives and personality and had this to say about their findings:
"People with an ultra-dominance profile scored higher on narcissism and tended to perceive themselves as leaders, despite not being deemed more leader-like by teammates."
What about envy and jealousy in the workplace?
In the productive year of 2023, Michael Agyekum Addo and Isaac Mensah published an article where they selected four CEO's of entrepreneurial firms in Ghana.
They tried to find the consequences of envy and jealousy.
Their results showed that envy and jealousy were caused by perceived favoritism due to a lack of transparency, selfishness, greed, and nepotism.
Both led to an increase in labor turnover and loss of revenue.
They further suggest social ways of eliminating these negative effects through education, transparent communication, discipline, friendliness, and firm and fair management strategies.
Never hire a Machiavellian personality type
Machiavellian types only concern themselves with gaining power over others at all costs regardless of the value they bring or the devestation they inflict on others.
Drory, and Gluskinos, back in 1980, argued they showed little concern for both interpersonal relationships with their followers and their feelings.
While Sharjeel Slaem and fellow researchers found that:
"Machiavellianism has an indirect negative effect on individual-level task performance through the serial cross-level mediating effects of abusive supervision at the group level and attendant individual-level burnout."
I talked about why relationship and task leadership have positive outcomes in reducing workplace injuries in my article about leadership for beginners.
But Drory, and Gluskinos also found that managers high in Machiavellianism gave more orders and were less involved in reducing tension. But the worst part was that they were less directive and requested more assistance when the situation was unfavorable.
Back in 2010, research done in Australia and the Philippines by Kohyar Kiazad et al. showed that employees felt machiavellian managers were adopting abusive supervision. But they also found that the lower the organization-based self-esteem (neuroticism higher than extroversion), the more likely employees perceived higher levels of authoritarian leadership as abusive.
This might be because Machiavellians are self-interested and only focus on their achievements according to Sloan Cooper and Christopher Peterson.
Richard P. Bagozzi and fellow researchers put account managers in a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine. They found that Machiavellians show a negative correlation between perspective-taking and emotional sharing in empathic processes in general. They further found that Machiaveelians have an impact on managerial control on both performance and employee behaviors.
Panagiotis Gkorezis, Eugenia Petridou, and Theodora Krouklidoua found in their research back in 2015 that Machiavellian managers emotionally exhaust their employees.
That suggests that if you hire or already have a Machiavellian manager, you might want to consider buying them out or not hiring them.
The HEXACO test works fine to identify this behavior through Honesty & Humility traits.
Empathetic managers and employees might not be a great thing
In 2024, David Hampton-Musseau investigated supervisors' abusive feedback, empathy, revenge, and forgiveness.
He found that managers who have an abusive supervisory approach also seek revenge and never forgive.
Empathy was also found to be the link between abusive supervisory experience and revenge/forgiveness.
People with high empathy lowered the effects of experiencing abusive supervision but unexpectedly also expressed fewer intentions to forgive.
This is most likely due to damage or lesions in the right hemisphere as I describe in "Which Part of The Brain Are You Writing For?"
What personality traits predict work creativity?
It turns out that more than one research paper has investigated what personality traits predict that the future employee will be creative at work.
Amy Shaw, Faye Y. Yuan, and Melissa Clark 2023 found that Extroversion and Openness to Exploration positively predict work creativity.
The one trait that predicted negative work creativity was Agreeableness. Since women in egalitarian countries drift higher in all three traits, it might mean they cancel each other out.
You should look for and hire only people normal to high in extroversion and openness to exploration and normal to low in agreeableness.
This personality type is not gender specific since men in egalitarian countries drift towards introversion, disagreeableness, and low openness to exploration.
You would find more normal personality traits in Asian countries.
Creating value for stakeholders in high-growth firms
Mirella Schrijvers & Jan Jacob Vogelaar from the School of Economics at Utrecht University 2023 published the paper "The impact of growth: Stakeholder value creation by high-growth firms"
They listed the following as positive for stakeholder value creation by high-growth firms in The Netherlands.
Building long-term relationships (mentioned 5 times as positive)
Higher quality products or services
Better access to products or services
Business interests of firm and consumer
Employing disadvantaged groups.
Preferring local suppliers
Good customer experience
Creating meaningful jobs for the community
Creating a sense of pride in firm achievement
Providing an opportunity for meaningful investment.
Engaging and crediting the user community
Building a Shareholder Community
Aligning firm goals
Educating customers
Transparency of impact of firm
Releasing innovation open source.
Sharing knowledge or experiences with societal projects
Participating in research projects with knowledge institutes
Providing educational opportunities and internships.
Mentoring and inspiring other entrepreneurs.
Improving work conditions of suppliers.
Promoting employee health and well-being.
Providing employees with a pleasant and healthy work environment.
New career opportunities for employees.
Educational opportunities
Working together to improve products or services.
Demanding suppliers to innovate or meet certain quality standards.
Educating suppliers about sustainability or working conditions. Giving employees a voice in firm decisions.
Providing meaningful work
Providing an adventurous work environment.
Valuing and crediting employees
Offering autonomy and responsibility
Providing stable and secure employment.
Providing bonuses and employee participation schemes.
Takeaways
Learn how to ask questions regarding the identification of dark tetrad personalities during:
Interviews
At the coffee table
In meetings
In emails
In chats
That way, you can better build knowledge about managers and employees.
Weigh what you see against the employee evaluations of their managers and employee turnover rates.
If someone is not being social by sharing knowledge. You should take action sooner rather than later.
Don't wait too long before you cut certain managers out from the business because many rely on you to make good quality decisions for everyone's well-being including stakeholders and revenue.
You should remove toxic managers as soon as possible, which is also what Omar Durrah, Taher Alkhalaf, and Olga Sharbatji also infer in their paper "Toxic leadership as a predictor of physical and psychological withdrawal behaviours in the healthcare sector".
If you are to focus on one thing in employees and managers. Focus on hiring highly extroverted, conscientious, Openness to exploration, and empathetic people and you will be safer.
But also use a female evaluator during interviews because they are the best at identifying male narcissists and female psychopaths.
Just make sure she’s not dark tetrad or she might feel empathy for the prospect and lie to you.
You need a test like the HEXACO test or another test to screen for psychopathy and Machiavellianism.
That's it for this week's "Feedback Loop" newsletter.
See you next Saturday.
More resources
“Why We Love” by Dr. Anna Machin
“The Life Of Dad” by Dr. Anna Machin
“The Master and His Emissary” by Dr. Iain McGilchrist
“The Matter With Things” by Dr. Iain McGilchrist