Reducing the Effect of Grandiose Narcissism on Self-Interested Unethical Behavior
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Narcissism—a personality trait prevalent in organizations—is characterized by grandiosity, entitlement, and a tendency to engage in unethical workplace behaviors. However, research has often treated narcissism as unidimensional, overlooking its subtypes: grandiose and vulnerable. The current research bridges this gap by examining the relationships between grandiose/vulnerable narcissism and self-interested unethical behavior as well as the mechanisms underlying these effects. Hypotheses were tested in a sample of full-time working adults (N = 176), using a moderation-of-process experimental design with a behavioral measure of self-interested unethical behavior. The findings indicated that grandiose narcissism was positively associated with self-interested unethical behavior and this effect was mediated by heightened self-interest and impulsivity. Targeted interventions deactivating these mechanisms effectively weakened the relationship between grandiose narcissism and self-interested unethical behavior, highlighting the potential for subtype-specific approaches to mitigating ethical misconduct. In contrast, vulnerable narcissism was not significantly associated with self-interested unethical behavior. Theoretically, our findings advance the organizational behavior literature by emphasizing the heterogeneity of narcissism and its relevance in unethical workplace behavior, providing causal evidence for the mediating roles of self-interest and impulsivity, and offering insights into the socioanalytic and self-regulatory nature underlying narcissistic behavior. Practically, our findings provide a foundation for the development of interventions aimed at reducing self-interested unethical workplace behaviors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".