The Dark Triad of Personality: Is Psychopathy a Good Predictor of Workplace Stress?

BACKGROUND: Psychopathy as an antisocial characteristic of an individual is characterized by a lack of empathy, guilt, inability to control impulsive behavior, irresponsibility, irritability and aggressive behavior. Because of the traits that underlie this factor, we hypothesized that psychopaths would experience more stress in the work environment. Stress, in this article, is operationalized within Karasek’s model of stress which consider that contextual variables (excessive demands on work, lack of social support, and lack of control at work) are responsible for experiencing stress at the workplace. This kind of work context, according to our assumption, can affect psychopaths to have a weaker response to stressful situations. OBJECTIVE: To determine the predictive power of psychopathy as a factor in the dark triad in order to explain the workplace stress. METHODS: We conducted the study in one company on a sample of 235 respondents. Data were collected using the Sociodemographic Characteristics Questionnaire, the Dark Triad Questionnaire (SD27) and the Copenhagen Questionnaire for measuring cognitive, behavioral and somatic stress. RESULTS: The mean age of the respondents was 39.04±10.27 years. Using standard regression analysis, we found that the dark triad model is the only significant one in explaining cognitive stress, and a significant predictor is psychopathy. CONCLUSION: In majority of previous studies, psychopathy has not been associated with stress, and the findings are important for future research that should shed light on the complex relationship between psychopathy and stress.