THE IMPACT OF DARK PERSONALITY TRAITS ON SOFTWARE PROFESSIONALS’ PERFORMANCE

Abstract

The personality of an employee has shown a great impact on workplace outcomes.  The dark side as well as the bright side of individuals’ personalities play a major role in their job performances. In research mostly the positive traits or bright side of the employees’ personalities have been addressed in general workplaces. However, limited work has been done on the personality dysfunctionalities or dark side of employees’ personalities. The aim of this research is to assess the personality disorders of software professionals by using a dark personality traits-based model. This assessment is carried out with the help of an instrument that has been designed to study the personality variables of software professionals. The instrument items are based on the Big Five personality traits model to assess overall personality and the Dark Triad traits scale (Jones and Paulhus 2014) to examine personality dysfunctionalities. The results show that ‘narcissism’ among Dark Triad traits, and ‘agreeableness’ and ‘conscientiousness’ from Big Five contain a significant positive relationship with Software Team Performance (STP), whereas the ‘extraversion’ from Big Five and ‘psychopathy’ construct of Dark Triad traits were found individually in a negative relationship with STP. The ‘extraversion’ construct showed an approximately more significant score than ‘psychopathy’. In general, the results of this study will be helpful in exploring personality disorders among software professionals and identifying their impacts on their work performance and productivity in the domain of software engineering.

Keywords

Personality Traits, Dark Triads, Dysfunctional Personality, Software Professionals, Software Team Performance