One would imagine that a toxic personality at work would be sufficient to derail one’s career, but new research from the University of Bonn reminds us that things aren’t always so straightforward.

The researchers characterize a toxic personality as someone who behaves immodestly, unfairly or greedily, with only a passing relation with the truth.  The researchers found that with strong social skills, such people can still find their way to the top.

Of course, social skills are valuable regardless of the rest of your personality, but the study found they were especially valuable in deceiving others and allowing people to abuse trust.  The researchers found that such socially adept swines were often rated more highly by their superiors, and typically occupied higher positions as a result.

Dark traits

The study found that such toxic personalities often score poorly on things such as modesty and honesty, but their strong social skills allow them to pull the wool over their colleague’s eyes.

The findings emerged after extensive interviews were conducted across a wide range of work teams to both understand the characteristics of participants, and then the social skills of those individuals.  These appraisals were provided by both the individuals themselves, and their supervisors and colleagues.

Career success

The assessment clearly shows that even those employees who scored poorly for honesty and modesty could achieve success in their careers if they were able to mask these negative traits with strong social skills.

“In order to slow down the ascent of toxic personalities, more attention should be paid to actual performance and less to the good impression when selecting staff and making assessments,” the researchers suggest.

Of course, that’s not always easy, especially in roles such as leadership, where there is a strong requirement to impress and arouse interest.  In such roles, the researchers believe you can spot toxic personalities by looking around the individual, such as at the sickness rate of colleagues, or the employee turnover rate.

Trickle down

It’s worth tackling this, however, as research highlights how this toxic environment can rapidly spread throughout an organization.  The research shows that abusive behavior towards an employee not only affects that specific employee, but it also encourages other members of the team to begin acting abusively towards one another.

“That’s the most disturbing finding,” the researchers said, “because it’s not just about individual victims now, it’s about creating a context where everybody suffers, regardless of whether you were individually abused or not.”

The researchers suggest this spread of behaviors can be explained by social learning theory, which suggests that people learn, then model their behaviors based upon observing others.  In this case, the observation is obviously of their boss.  So it’s not just the positive behaviors of a manager that is likely to be mimicked, their negative ones are too.