Ambition: a deterrent to workplace deviance among narcissistic leaders

Abstract

Purpose

Workplace deviance remains a concern for many organizations, and narcissism has been identified as a primary contributor. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether political skill and ambition interact with narcissism to attenuate or exacerbate workplace deviance.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors surveyed a sample of 335 participants in leadership positions and empirically tested interactions among political skill, narcissism and ambition in predicting workplace deviance.

Findings

The authors performed moderated hierarchical regression analyses on the data to test the hypothesis and research question. Contrary to expectations, political skill attenuated the relationship between narcissism and workplace deviance. However, ambition was found to attenuate deviance, with the highest levels of deviance evident when narcissism was high, political skill was low, and ambition was also low.

Originality/value

Although research has examined the relationship between narcissism and workplace deviance, to the authors’ knowledge, the study is the first to examine the roles of political skill and ambition in attenuating the manifestation of narcissism into workplace deviance.

Citation

Davison, H.K., Braddy, P.W., Meriac, J.P., Gigliotti, R., Detwiler, D.J. and Bing, M.N. (2022), "Ambition: a deterrent to workplace deviance among narcissistic leaders", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 43 No. 3, pp. 422-434. https://doi.org/10.1108/LODJ-03-2021-0137