The good, the bad, and the successful: The Three Nightmare Traits and career success

The Three Nightmare Traits (TNT; disagreeableness, carelessness, and dishonesty; aka the Three Nonnormative Traits) represent low levels of socially desirable self-control, i.e., unsuccessful socialization. They are an emerging concept to explain and understand interpersonal and organizational behaviors and outcomes of dark personalities. This paper provides both a novel theoretical approach and empirical research on how the TNT relate to objective career success. To theoretically clarify this relationship between TNT and career success we combined the TNT concept with the fearless dominance approach of successful psychopathy. Fearless dominance combines extraversion, low emotionality, and risk-taking. In this theoretical approach, (un-)successful socialization (TNT) moderates the relation between fearless dominance and career success. In our study, we assessed the TNT, fearless dominance, and objective career success, i.e., attained hierarchical position, in 285 salespeople and managers from a nationwide business. As predicted, the TNT moderated the relation between fearless dominance and hierarchical position. At low TNT levels (i.e., successful socialization), the positive effects of fearless dominance were especially strong; at high TNT levels (i.e., unsuccessful socialization), there was no relation between fearless dominance and hierarchical position. Finally, as uniquely postulated by the concept of the TNT, there was a U-shaped relation between the TNT and hierarchical position, implying that both the extremely bad and the extremely good attained higher hierarchical positions. Among the TNT, dishonesty had the strongest effects. In sum, our findings enrich and balance views on managers' (dark) personalities and career success. Seemingly paradoxically, both the bad and the good are individually successful.