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Literature on psychology highlights four traits that shape an amoral and antisocial personality: Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy and sadism. Together, these personality traits form the Dark Tetrad. In this study, the standard intertemporal utility maximization model is reassessed from the point of view of a representative economic agent endowed with the Dark Tetrad personality traits.

The approach followed in this paper consists of identifying how each of the Dark Tetrad traits might be logically associated with the dynamic utility problem, as well as exploring, in the context of the model, the implications, for consumption and utility, of admitting the presence of such traits in individuals’ personalities.

It is found that, typically, dark personalities penalize consumption growth, even when such traits are interpreted directly and positively contributing to the utility of the agent. It is also found that in economies with two or more interacting agents, the dark traits might have a mutually destructive nature.

Economics is going through a smooth revolution in the direction of becoming an eminently behavioral science. Most of the traditional economic models, based on the idea of the hyper-rational agent, are being replaced or complemented by a different view of the homo-economicus, in which, among other things, personality matters. This paper offers a novel contribution in this direction.

Following the theory of emotional events, this paper aims to use the bright triad and the dark tetrad as representations to investigate the role of positive and negative personality patterns in achieving positive and negative innovation. The study also examines the mediating role of emotional intelligence and abusive supervision and the interactive role of emotional exhaustion in understanding the relationship between positive and negative personality patterns and positive and negative innovation.

To test the hypotheses of the study model, a set of questionnaires was distributed to a sample of 500 medical officers working in different departments of public hospitals in southern Iraq. The data were analysed using the structured equation model.

The results of the current study confirm previous studies on emotional intelligence because the bright triad negatively associates with negative innovation and positively associates with positive innovation. Meanwhile, the dark tetrad positively associates with negative innovation through abusive supervision, and that emotional exhaustion reinforces the negative side and weakens the positive side of the relationships.

This study contributes to the literature by emphasising that the values represented by the bright triad have a strong readiness to show positive innovation and immunity to negative influence caused by abusive supervision. Meanwhile, the negative emotions of the dark tetrad pattern result in negative patterns because they correlate with negative innovation and the avoidance of positive behaviour, which is escalated by abusive supervision.

When assessing the psychometric properties of measures and estimate relations among latent variables, many studies in the social sciences (including management and marketing) often fail to comprehensively appraise the directionality of indicants. Such failures can lead to model misspecification and inaccurate parameter estimates. The purpose of this paper is to apply a post hoc test called confirmatory vanishing tetrad analysis (CTA hereafter) to a single construct called mass media consumption information exposure, which antecedent studies conceptually posited to be a formative (causative) representation.

This paper analyses a consumer sample of 585 US respondents and applies the CTA test to a single construct by its inclusion in various matrices within a statistical analysis system‐macro that takes into account nonnormal data characteristics. The matrices are derived from Mplus 5 through the estimation of a single‐factor congeneric model. The CTA test calculates a test statistic similar to an asymptotic χ² distribution with degrees of freedom equal to the number of nonredundant tetrads tested.

The preliminary data analyses reveal that the data characteristics are nonnormal which is not uncommon in social research. The CTA results reveal that the reflective (emergent) item orientation cannot be fully ruled out as being the correct model representation. This is in contrast to prior theoretical conceptual work which would strongly support this construct being a formative representation.

Insofar as the authors are aware, there is no paper with a particular focus on how the CTA might not provide sound results with a demonstrated example. The paper makes a valuable contribution by discussing modelling philosophy and a procedure for directionality testing. The authors advocate the implementation of pre and post hoc tests as a key component of standard research practice.

The role of dark side personality characteristics in the workplace has received increasing attention in the organizational sciences and from leadership researchers in particular. We provide a review of this area, mapping out the key frameworks for assessing the dark side. We pay particular attention to the roles that the dark side plays in leadership processes and career dynamics, with special attention given to destructive leadership. Further, we examine the role that stress plays in the emergence of leaders and how the dark side plays into that process. We additionally provide discussion of the possible roles that leaders can play in producing stress experiences for their followers. We finally illustrate a dynamic model of the interplay of dark leadership, social relationships, and stress in managerial derailment. Throughout, we emphasize a functionalist account of these personality characteristics, placing particular focus on the motives and emotional capabilities of the individuals under discussion.

Companies understand the potential to use gamification marketing to facilitate a better connection. However, most endeavours in gamification fail. This study aims to identify the design factors that drive the marketing effectiveness of branded applications (apps) with gamification features.

This study investigates branded apps covering various industries such as hospitality, retail and financial services. A total of 296 respondents were recruited from an online questionnaire platform.

The results show that playability, design aesthetics, goal clarity, incentive provision and symbolic benefits were drivers of consumer–brand engagement, which in turn generated purchase intention, app continuance intention and brand loyalty.

Based on the elemental tetrad model, this study specified relevant factors identified in the literature to represent the technology, aesthetic, mechanical and story elements. The authors contribute to the literature by identifying design factors as drivers of consumer–brand engagement in the branded app context.

How do dark personality traits impact workplace bullying (WB)? How can organizations mitigate it? This study aims to explore the relationship between the Dark Tetrad (DT) (narcissism, psychopathy [PY], Machiavellianism and sadism [SM]) and WB, proposing the mediation role of moral disengagement (MD) and the moderation role of emotional stability (ES).

The proposed mediated-moderation model was tested on 404 employees working in the hospitality sector in Pakistan. Data have been analyzed through regression analysis and PROCESS macros to test the study’s hypotheses.

PY, Machiavellianism and SM positively relate to WB and MD mediates this relationship. A high level of ES reduces the intensity of the mediated influence of PY, Machiavellianism and SM on WB.

Developing targeted policies and practices (e.g. personality tests to build a good psychological architecture of the firm) and reviewing processes that support the moral justification of antisocial conduct can be beneficial for limiting WB. In addition, meditation, mindfulness training and supporting trust and cooperation within organizations can increase the mitigating effect of ES and, in turn, reduce WB.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that explicitly verifies a mediated-moderation model on DT-WB while proposing a further explanation (i.e. mediation of MD) and a novel solution (i.e., moderation by ES).

In pharmaceutical marketing, salespeople require promotional instruments to satisfy and retain their customers (physicians), but companies ignore the need because of the costs involved. It appears that the importance of promotional support is understood differently by managers and sales representatives. This study aims at developing a new construct called “promotional support”, as a resource support provided to salespeople to help them satisfy customer needs and achieve sales goals.

A detailed review of literature is followed by in-depth interviews to create items for the construct “promotional support”. Substantive validity is performed for identification of items measuring the construct. To initially validate the measures, a vignette study is performed. Formative index development procedure is followed. Data from a sample of 124 pharmaceutical sales representatives are collected and analyzed.

A formative construct is developed which possesses convergent (redundancy analysis) and nomological validity. The results of post hoc validation tests like confirmatory tetrad analysis and inter-item correlation are satisfactory and confirm the authors’ conceptualization.

The scale requires external validation by testing it with different samples such as managers of pharmaceutical firms.

This study will help managers of pharmaceutical firms gain insights into the role and importance of promotional inputs given to their sales representatives.

This study uses the formative scale development procedure to develop promotional support. This construct can be used to understand the effect of promotional support given to pharmaceutical sales representatives on other constructs, which in turn helps in theory-building.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a model of competitiveness for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) by investigating the structural relationship between organizational structure, knowledge quality (KQ) dimensions, improvisational creativity, compositional creativity and innovation in an emerging market – Malaysia – grounding in sense-making and organizational improvisational theories.

A total of 358 valid questionnaires administered among SMEs’ top management were used in examining the measurement model and structural relationship between latent constructs using partial least squares (PLS) path-modelling approach.

The findings indicate that a flat organizational structure influences business entities’ sense-making activities in the way they realize the intrinsic value of knowledge (intrinsic KQ) and take action to apply the organizational knowledge (actionable KQ). These sense-making activities are also conducive to SMEs’ improvisational creativity, compositional creativity and innovative capabilities. All KQ dimensions are positively interrelated, thus supporting sense-making theory.

A sustainable competitive advantage for SMEs requires a setting that is based on a lean, decentralized and cooperative organizational structure that shapes organizational KQ. As a contribution to the literature, accessibility KQ is introduced as a KQ dimension. Even though previous research was unclear on the reflectiveness/formativeness of KQ, by applying confirmatory tetrad analysis-PLS, this study empirically supports that KQ is a formative construct.

Customer loyalty is a focal concern for marketers who seek to identify its antecedents and causal structure with the aim of better understanding, predicting and managing loyalty. The purpose of this paper is to model both current behaviour (measured as share of wallet) and future intentions as measures of customer loyalty, to quantify the link between current and future behaviour.

A hybrid model, combining reflective and formative constructs, was developed, moving away from the traditional “reflective only” approach to explain customer loyalty. New predictors such as variety seeking, “resistance to change” and risk taking behaviour were tested to explain loyalty.

While “risk” is traditionally viewed as a key variable in financial services, this study finds that variety seeking and “resistance to change” predicted current behaviour and future behavioural intentions better than risk. Higher explanatory power and better model fit was found for a hybrid model combining formative and reflective constructs; in contrast to the more common fully reflective approach.

This study adds to the emerging debate on whether concepts such as loyalty should be treated as reflective and/or formative. The implications from this study suggest that future research can usefully model current behaviour as formative and future intentions as reflective. Future research should test the extent that these findings apply across products and services beyond banking.

This study establishes that variety seeking and “resistance to change” can usefully explain and predict loyalty. The examination of “formative” and “reflective” concepts in explaining loyalty is also novel.

The purpose of this paper is to critically review and synthesize the scale development practices in hospitality and tourism and propose updated guidelines applicable for both reflective and composite scales.

Using a critical review of a sample of scale development papers published in six top-tier tourism and hospitality journals, the current guidelines' weaknesses and strengths and their applications are identified. Updated procedures are proposed to overcome these weaknesses.

This review showed several issues in applying existing guidelines, including incomplete and unclear data collection processes, inconsistent data analysis processes including validity/reliability assessment and lack of criteria to identify and assess composite scales. As such, this paper proposes updated guidelines by incorporating the confirmatory composite analysis to assess composite scales.

This paper offers unique theoretical and methodological contributions to scale development literature, by identifying the shortcomings of current practices of scale development and propose guidelines for both reflective and composite scales. The current scale development procedures cannot be applied for composite scales, and so the results of composite scale development using the current procedures are questionable. The updated guidelines by the current study improve new scales' accuracy, reliability and validity.