While grandiose narcissism is well-studied, vulnerable narcissism remains largely unexplored in the workplace context. Our study aimed to compare grandiose and vulnerable narcissism among managers and people from the general population. Within the managerial sample, our objective was to examine how these traits diverge concerning core personality traits and socially desirable responses. Furthermore, we endeavored to explore their associations with individual managerial performance, encompassing task performance, contextual performance, and counterproductive work behavior (CWB). Involving a pool of managerial participants (N = 344), we found that compared to the general population, managers exhibited higher levels of grandiose narcissism and lower levels of vulnerable narcissism. While both narcissistic variants had a minimal correlation (r = .02) with each other, they differentially predicted work performance. Notably, grandiose narcissism did not significantly predict any work performance dimension, whereas vulnerable narcissism, along with neuroticism, predicted higher CWB and lower task performance. Conscientiousness emerged as the strongest predictor of task performance. This study suggests that organizations might not benefit from managers with vulnerable narcissism. Understanding these distinct narcissistic variants offers insights into their impacts on managerial performance in work settings.

The Dark Factor of Personality (D) measures the latent core of antagonistic traits. The present study evaluated the psychometric properties of the Swedish version of the full (D70) and the brief (D16) versions, concerning structural validity, item information, and convergent validity. An online sample (N = 294) was analyzed using CFA (Maximum Likelihood Estimation), IRT (Graded Response Model) and SEM (latent correlations). Firstly, the original theorized bifactor model for D70 and a single-factor model for D16 showed good fit to the data. Moreover, new reliability-analyses based on FD and H indicated that the D70 favorably can be collapsed into a unidimensional measure, which is further discussed. Secondly, the IRT-analyses present valid item quality and functioning and showed that items provide the most information on trait levels above mean levels. Lastly, convergent SEM-analyses showed that D had high latent trait correlations to psychopathy and Machiavellianism, but not to narcissism. The correlations with the Big Six personality factors (mini-IPIP6) yielded expected high correlations with Agreeableness and Honesty-Humility. The Swedish translation of the full D70 and brief D16 is recommended for use in future research.

Leaders of today need to achieve well in terms of task performance, perceiving low stress, and having high levels of work engagement. One may ask whether trait-based leadership resource factors can be identified and how such resource factors might relate to task performance, perceived stress, and work engagement. Our aim was to test the hypothesis, derived from Hobfoll’s motivational Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, that there are trait-based leadership resource factors, which are differentially correlated to the leaders’ task performance, perceived stress, and work engagement. Leaders (N = 344) aged from 23 to 65 years (M = 49, SD = 8.6; 58% women) completed an online questionnaire including measures of task performance, perceived stress, work engagement, personality traits, trait emotional intelligence, empathy, performance-related self-esteem, compassionate and rational leadership competence, and coping resources for stress. Using exploratory factor analysis, we identified four trait-based leadership resource factors. With Bonferroni adjustment, and controlling for sex, age, number of years in the current managerial position, self-deceptive enhancement, and impression management, only Rational Mastery was significantly positively correlated with task performance. Rational Mastery, Efficient Coping, and Modesty were negatively correlated with perceived stress, and all factors except Modesty, but including the fourth (Good-Heartedness) were positively correlated with work engagement. Organizations striving for sustainable work conditions should support trait-based leadership, which depends not only on a task-oriented resource such as rational mastery, but also on human-oriented resources such as efficient coping, modesty, and good-heartedness, all of them being differentially related to task performance, perceived stress, and work engagement.  

Trait emotional intelligence (EI) predicts important outcomes in the workplace. This study is the first one that reports item and scale functioning in the workplace using item response theory (IRT) analysis of the global 30-item Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire Short-Form (TEIQue-SF). Past IRT research, performed mostly on undergraduate English-speaking students, showed that several items in TEIQue-SF were poorly informative. Data collected in Sweden from 972 employed persons were analyzed. IRT with a graded response model was utilized to analyze items of the global TEIQue-SF scale. As was found in past research, the lowest response category in all items had extreme difficulty threshold parameter values, and only low and moderate levels of latent trait EI were adequately captured, but most items had good values of the discrimination parameters, indicating adequate item informativeness. Four items, which in past research have also shown weak psychometric properties, were poorly informative. To effectively measure trait EI in today’s organizations, there is an advantage in using the most informative items to best represent this construct. 

The Personality Differentiation by Intelligence Hypothesis (PDIH) predicts larger trait-variances, and smaller across-trait covariances for individuals with higher intelligence. We tested these predictions using multiple-group confirmatory factor analyses (MG-CFA), while controlling for the potential confound of systematic method variance related to reversed items using a correlated trait, correlated method (CTCM) approach. Participants between the ages of 62 and 68 completed measures of personality (Mini-IPIP: Donnellan et al., 2006) and intelligence (Raven APM-12: Arthur & Day, 1994). After establishing strict measurement invariance (MI), we found no support for larger variances, and only minor support for lower trait covariances as related to higher intelligence. Overall, the findings provide scant support for the PDIH when controlling for systematic method variance.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Given recent advances in psychometric assessment, there is a need for assessment studies using modern test theory in the field of person-centred care, mainly due to the dominant use of analytical strategies based on classical test theory. The main objective of the present study was thus to examine whether selected items from commonly used instruments of person-centred care were able to differentiate between respondents with a reasonably even level of measurement precision across different regions of the construct range using item response theory (IRT).

RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: A Swedish sample of care staff in elderly care (N = 1342) completed a survey including a selection of items from three previously validated measures of person-centred care.

RESULTS: All questionnaire items were submitted to IRT analyses to examine the extent to which the items produced information on the underlying construct. The items exhibited different levels of information. However, in general, for those items exhibiting some information, the pattern of information across the trait range was similar for most of them, that is, the items discriminated better in the lower levels of person-centredness.

DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS: Item response theory analyses are instrumental in creating shorter measurement instruments that may perform nearly as well as the original longer instruments. Given time and other resource constraints in questionnaire administration, there is a gain in only including the most informative items which efficiently and evenly tap the underlying construct along its entire range and in the context of person-centred care assessment this study was an initial step towards this goal. Thus, a set of ten items with satisfactory levels of psychometric quality, that is relatively high information levels across a relatively broad range of the underlying construct, is proposed.

Social resource theory suggests that social interaction can be conceived as resource transaction or exchange with behaviours falling within six fundamental resource categories (i.e. love, status, information, money, goods, and services) organised along two underlying dimensions: particularism–universalism and concreteness–abstractness. With the purpose of extending knowledge about quality of care, this study adopts a novel approach in that it describes and categorises care behaviours using social resource theory instead of using single instances of care behaviour. The categorisation is further used to predict client satisfaction in care services targeting older people. Daily interactions between care staff and older persons were observed in two different residential care facilities using a structured non-participant observation design. The data were analysed using principal component analysis, correlation, and regression analysis. The results confirmed the hypothesis that satisfaction with care services is predicted by resource transactions that are high on the underlying dimensions of particularism and abstractness. Thus, the resource categories of love and status (resource categories high on particularism and abstractness) were shown to be strong predictors of client satisfaction. The use of social resource theory is a novel and appropriate approach to examine person-centred care and satisfaction with care. Also, in addition to addressing potential problems in previous self-report studies on care staff behaviour, the observational technique was highly practical to this service area where dealing with clients not always able to provide feedback directly. 

Stress is a factor that greatly impacts our lives. Previous research has examined individual differences in relation to stress. However, research regarding malevolent personality traits in relation to how stress is perceived is limited. The purpose of the present study was to investigate relationships between dark malevolent personality traits; psychopathy (EPA), Machiavellianism (MACH-IV), vulnerable narcissism (HSNS), grandiose narcissism (NPI-13), and perceived stress (PSS-10) in a community sample (N = 346). The results showed a strong positive relationship between vulnerable narcissism and perceived stress, while grandiose narcissism and psychopathy showed a small negative relationship with perceived stress. The discussion centers on that narcissism should be treated as two separate traits, and that psychopathy and Machiavellianism overlap in relation to the experience of stress in everyday life.

The background for the present study is that facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) is suggested to function as an evolutionary cue for threatening behavior such as perceived aggression. With a novel approach, in this pilot study, we explored whether fWHR can be detected in observers brain responses measured by event-related potentials (ERP), specifically, the Late Positive Potential (LPP) component (400-3000ms after stimuli onset). The hypothesis was that faces with a high fWHR would elicit a larger LPP amplitude than faces with a low fWHR. The results showed that faces with high fWHRs were indeed perceived as more aggressive and elicited significantly greater LPP amplitudes. The conclusion lends initial support to fWHR serving as a facial cue with evolutionary relevance. We caution that future full-length studies need to take the current small-scale study's limitations into consideration.