Researchers develop a tool to assess narcissism in job candidates

It feels like narcissism is everywhere these days: politics, movies and TV, sports, social media. You might even see signs of it at work, where it can be particularly detrimental. Is it possible to keep a workplace free of destructive, manipulative egotists?

More and more organizations have gone to experts in organizational psychology asking for help doing just that. In response, as team of researchers has developed a tool for job interviews to assess narcissistic grandiosity among potential job candidates. The result was published in the Journal of Personality Assessment.

What the researchers say: “We focused on narcissism because it’s one of the most talked about characteristics of people. Really, it represents a lot of things that can go bad in terms of a team,” the lead author said. “But it’s a characteristic that is very attractive in the short-term. [Narcissists] often have tendencies to be very goal-oriented and are often very successful. There’s a lure to somebody who is high in narcissism.”

The tool developed by the researchers — the Narcissism Interview Scale for Employment (NISE) — is a set of behavioral and situational questions that can be incorporated into a job interview. One question asks respondents to describe their approach to leading a team. Another asks how candidates would procced if they disagree with a plan that the rest of their team likes — and the project requires unanimous consent to move forward. Interviewers are trained to rate candidate responses, providing a more scientific and consistent way to evaluate a candidate’s propensity for narcissistic grandiosity.

The project started four years ago when the lead author noticed an uptick in organizations asking about effective teams, candidate selection and how to avoid “bad apples.” It’s easy for organizations to be enticed by how a candidate’s skills appear on paper, but failing to properly consider personality might derail team-oriented environments, he explained. Employees with narcissistic grandiosity tend to have inflated views of self and make self-focused and short term-focused decisions instead of considering long-term organizational needs. They may also abuse and try to protect their sense of power and control.

“This isn’t a categorical diagnosis,” the researchers clarified, noting that everyone probably falls somewhere on the continuum of narcissism. “What we’re looking at are people’s consistencies over time. It’s how they view themselves or how others view them consistently over time. Do they engage in these actions consistently?”

The authors acknowledge that this assessment is not a perfect science. There are many other factors in building a successful team and healthy work environment. But they hope their tool will increase the odds for success.

While the researchers have been studying these topics for years, they wanted to make sure their tool was easy to use and could be adapted by different work environments. It is why they focused on job interviews, something accepted and considered appropriate by both organizations and applicants in the hiring process.

So, what? It will be interesting to see how long it takes for narcissistic job interviewees to tailor their answers to show that they are not narcissists. In fact, narcissists should be particularly good at that.