Gerhard Blickle

University of Bonn | Uni Bonn · Institute of Psychology

Selbstständige Verkäufer im Außendienst sind bis heute für den Erfolg von Versicherungsunternehmen von essentieller Bedeutung. Zu ihren Kernaufgaben gehört es, potentielle Kunden aktiv zu identifiziert, ein Kontakt herzustellen, Gespräche zur Neuakquisition zu führen, etablierte Kunden zu betreuen und zu binden, die Beziehung zu ihnen zu festigen s...

The present chapter aims to expand the trait-based approach to psychopathy by distinguishing between potentially adaptive and maladaptive features of psychopathic personality in the workplace. Answering the calls for a facet-level approach to psychopathy, we hypothesized that fearless dominance and self-centered impulsivity would exhibit differenti...

The Five-Factor Machiavellianism Inventory (FFMI) was specifically designed to rectify validity concerns with traditional measures of Machiavellianism. In this study with 550 career targets and 1127 knowledgeable informants at work from a broad range of occupations and organizations we tested whether the FFMI outperforms traditional measures of Mac...

Der aktuelle BewerberInnenmarkt ist für ManagerInnen und HR-Verantwortliche so herausfordernd wie selten zuvor. Denn sie befinden sich in einer Zwickmühle: Einerseits möchten sie ihre Vakanzen weiterhin mit den vielversprechendsten Talenten besetzen, andererseits kommen sie im Wettbewerb um die besten Köpfe kaum noch in den Luxus, überhaupt auswähl...

Leadership impacts the lives of billions of people around the world. In healthy organizations, leadership is a productive force that inspires cooperation and builds cultures that give people meaning and purpose in their lives. In dysfunctional organizations, in contrast, leadership can perpetuate the misery of thousands of people by being the prima...

Recent research has suggested that self‐ and other‐ratings of personality may provide different information about personality, which can be captured in the trait‐reputation‐identity (TRI) model. Based on the TRI model, we investigate the link between personality and aligned job performance criteria on domain and aspect levels of the Big Five person...

The personality trait of fearless dominance originated from research on psychopathy and incorporates features of high fearlessness, resilience, and social potency. Due to the apparent adaptiveness of fearless dominance, some researchers question whether it truly belongs under the overarching construct of psychopathy. However, recent research has su...

Assessment centers (AC) are one of the most common selection and recruitment methods in today’s business world, with very high acceptance in practice. The AC research literature, however, has focused on managerial performance and neglected sales performance. Therefore, we assessed the features of ACs for sales positions. The results indicated that...

In this chapter, we report on an experimental study which examined how different impression management (IM) tactics used by applicants in job interviews influence interviewer evaluations of the two universal dimensions of social judgment (likeability, competence) and how these fundamental personal evaluations in turn affect perceived hireability. E...

Given the equivocal findings pertaining to the outcomes of voice, recent attention has shifted towards the nuances of voice behavior. Recently, research suggested that supervisors evaluate both whether an employee speaks up in addition to what they speak up about. Building on this notion, we argue that reason-to motives (i.e., climate for initiativ...

Building on recent findings corroborating nonlinear associations between vulnerable and grandiose narcissism, we explored the possibility of nonlinear relations between the dimensions of psychopathy and Machiavellianism, respectively. We tested the relations within Machiavellianism using the Five Factor Machiavellianism Inventory (FFMI) in a sample...

Research on emotion recognition ability (ERA) and psychopathy produces divergent outcomes: While some studies find ERA deficits in persons with psychopathy, others find heightened emotional abilities. In this study, we seek to disentangle these inconclusive findings by employing different measures of psychopathy, analyzing them globally as well as...

Emotion recognition ability of emotions expressed by other people (ERA-O) can be important for job performance, leadership, bargaining, and career success. Traditional personnel assessment tools of this ability, however, are contaminated by linguistic skills. In a time of global work migration, more and more people speak a language at work that is...

In diesem Beitrag wird der konzeptuelle Zusammenhang von Führung und Persönlichkeit aus psychologischer Sicht untersucht. Dafür stellen wir ausgehend von der sozioanalytischen Persönlichkeitstheorie Grundannahmen zur Bedeutung von Führung aus evolutionärer Perspektive dar und erläutern die dazugehörigen Konzepte von Persönlichkeit und sozialen Komp...

Research on the effectiveness of Machiavellian leaders has found contradictory results. By linking Socioanalytic and Trait Activation theory to the Machiavellianism and leadership literature, we argue that political skill may explain these findings by moderating the relation between Machiavellianism and leadership effectiveness. Using a multisource...

Does psychopathy have an upside in vocational contexts? Applying the triarchic model of psychopathy, we propose that the dimensions of boldness, disinhibition, and meanness have different relations to workplace outcomes. Focusing on boldness and in line with socioanalytic personality theory, we propose that political skill moderates the relation be...

Previous research has found that traditional assessments of Machiavellianism have insufficient construct coverage and strongly overlap with psychopathy. Tackling these issues, Collison et al. (2018) developed the Five Factor Machiavellianism Inventory (FFMI), comprising antagonism, agency, and planfulness. Research by Kückelhaus et al. (2020) stron...

This chapter provides an overview of the empirical work on political skill that has been published to date. As such, we highlight the antecedents of political skill and its four dimensions, namely social astuteness, interpersonal influence, apparent sincerity, and networking ability. We then turn our attention to the wealth of studies examining the...

The present study seeks to address the mixed results in the literature regarding the job tenure–job performance relationship by considering both individual resources and job context. General mental ability (GMA) is a strong predictor of knowledge acquisition. However, high job stress diminishes employee’s ability to learn and to retrieve learned kn...

In this paper, we analyze the vocational behavior of individuals with different scores on the personality trait of Machiavellianism. A meta-analysis showed (O'Boyle, Forsyth, Banks & McDaniel, 2012) that trait Machiavellianism is associated with low performance at work. This is surprising because Niccolò Machiavelli had success in mind when he repu...

Genau, H. A. & Blickle, G. (2021). Sind Psychopathen besonders intelligent? Gehirn & Geist (01/2021), 2-3. Abstract Die Meta-Analyse von de Ribera et al. (2019) zeigt, dass Menschen mit höheren Werten in Psychopathie tendenziell etwas weniger kognitiv intelligent sind, mit Ausnahme von Personen mit hohen Ausprägungen auf der interpersonellen Seite...

Genau, H. A. & Blickle, G. (2021). Kompetenter, dominanter und charismatischer? Körpergröße und Berufserfolg. Forschung & Lehre 1|21, 14-15. Letztendlich kann die Körpergröße also durchaus beruflichen Erfolg erleichtern-insbesondere, wenn jemand leicht überdurchschnittlich, aber nicht auffallend groß ist. So jemand wird als kompetenter, dominanter...

Previous research has found that emotion recognition ability for faces (ERA-F) positively predicts occupational status after controlling for age based on the variance it shares with General Mental Ability (GMA). As the voice might also be an important source of information in social communication, we tested whether emotion recognition ability for v...

Previous research has found that the ability to accurately recognize emotions expressed by others correlates with many vocational outcomes. However, these correlations might be due to third variables. We hypothesized that ERA for faces would indeed predict occupational status when controlling for age but that this relation would be erased when join...

Five Factor Machiavellianism Inventory (FFMI), German version, used by Kückelhaus, Blickle, Kranefeld, Körnig, & Genau (2020). The Five Factor Machiavellianism Inventory (FFMI; Collison, K. L., Vize, C. E., Miller, J. D., & Lynam, D. R. (2018). Development and preliminary validation of a Five Factor Model measure of Machiavellianism. Psychological...

Field sales jobs receive continued attention in research because of their importance to the success of enterprises. This study aimed to test how self-discipline and protective self-monitoring impact the predicted performance of field salespeople in three consecutive years. Previous research found that organizational tenure is a predictor of the cor...

Socioanalytic theory of personality (SAT) provides a perspective on human nature based on insights about human evolution, unconscious motivation, and the dynamics of social interaction. All three perspectives assume that, because humans evolved as group living animals, they have deep, organic needs for culture, i.e., collective rituals, family rela...

Numerous scholars have criticized the traditional assessment of Machiavellianism due to insufficient construct coverage, some going so far as to question its distinctness from psychopathy. Tackling these issues, Collison, Vize, Miller, and Lynam developed the Five Factor Machiavellianism Inventory (FFMI), comprising antagonism, agency, and planfuln...

Empathie gilt als eine Tugend, aber empirische Ergebnisse zeigen, dass Personen mit reduzierter Empathie aus bestimmten Perspektiven und unter spezifischen Bedingungen bessere Arbeitsergebnisse erzielen können. Kaltherzigkeit geht auch oft mit höherem Einkommen einher. Auf die berufliche Zufriedenheit wirkt sich dagegen eine niedrige Kaltherzigkeit...

Ein Merkmal, das als Facette einer psychopathischen Persönlichkeit gilt, weckt möglicherweise erstmal Misstrauen. Schaut man sich jedoch neuste Ergebnisse zur Persönlichkeitseigenschaft der furchtlosen Dominanz an, so ergibt sich ein ganz anderes Bild. Individuen mit einer hohen Merkmalsausprägung können für Organisationen von Vorteil sein – unter...

On the basis of socioanalytic theory (Hogan & Shelton, 1998) and mimicry-deception theory (Jones, 2014), we hypothesized that political skill would effectively mask Machiavellianism (socioanalytic theory) with consequences for coworker perceived career role performance and actual counterproductive work behavior at low and high levels of job tenure...

On the basis of socioanalytic theory (Hogan & Shelton, 1998) and mimicry-deception theory (Jones, 2014), we hypothesized that political skill would effectively mask Machiavellianism (socioanalytic theory) with consequences for coworker perceived career role performance and actual counterproductive work behavior at low and high levels of job tenure...

Low honesty-humility is a broad indicator of the common core of dark personality traits. The toxic career model specified by Templer (2018) explains how dark personalities successfully climb the organizational ladder. It suggests that dark personalities can get ahead at work via self- and other-rated political skill, which results in improved job p...

Political behavior in organizations refers to the power struggle over work and career assets. As research on the organizational political arena grew, it became clear that some individuals are more successful at managing this landscape than others. This emerging construct, termed political skill, was designed to capture the social savvy and competen...

We tested Lykken’s (1995) theory that the personality trait of fearless dominance (FD) can result in positive or negative life outcomes depending on whether the socialization process was successful or not. We tested FD’s predictive and moderated relations with vocational success over a time interval of 4 years. We found that the relations between F...

We tested Lykken’s (1995) theory that the personality trait of fearless dominance (FD) can result in positive or negative life outcomes depending on whether the socialization process was successful or not. We tested FD’s predictive and moderated relations with vocational success over a time interval of 4 years. We found that the relations between F...

We tested Lykken's (1995) theory that the personality trait of fearless dominance (FD) can result in positive or negative life outcomes depending on whether the socialization process was successful or not. We tested FD's predictive and moderated relations with vocational success over a time interval of 4 years. We found that the relations between F...

In this chapter we address the changes of work values resulting from economic globalization in Western and non-Western societies. Firstly, we explicate the terms work, gainful employment, and work values in their historical and current meaning. Secondly, we analyze how new requirements in a globalized economy change the meaning of work and work val...

An inventory to assess intraorganizational influence strategies (Blickle, 1995) was submitted to factorial, convergent, and discriminant validation studies with subjects employed in various organizations. In order to validate the inventory factorially observer ratings of upward and lateral influence behaviors were sampled. Factors were extracted wi...

This study sought to construct and validate the following German self-assessment scales to measure strategies of intraorganizational influence: pressure, upward appeals, exchange, coalition, ingratiation, rational persuasion, charismatic appeals, consultation, and manipulation. 342 subjects employed in various organizations participated in this que...

Auf Basis der politischen Karriereperspektive werden im folgenden Kapitel das Konstrukt der politischen Fertigkeiten und positive Effekte auf den individuellen Laufbahnerfolg, die berufliche Leistung und den Umgang mit Stressoren dargestellt. Vorweg wird das Konstrukt definiert, seine Facetten werden beschrieben sowie stabile Vorbedingungen, die be...

Auf Basis der politischen Karriereperspektive werden im folgenden Kapitel das Konstrukt der politischen Fertigkeiten und positive Effekte auf den individuellen Laufbahnerfolg, die berufliche Leistung und den Umgang mit Stressoren dargestellt. Vorweg wird das Konstrukt definiert, seine Facetten werden beschrieben sowie stabile Vorbedingungen, die be...

Unter Personalentwicklung versteht man alle gezielten Maßnahmen, um die Qualifikationen von Mitarbeitern und Führungskräften für deren gegenwärtige und zukünftige Aufgaben systematisch sicherzustellen. Am Anfang steht die Ermittlung des individuellen Entwicklungsbedarfs. Für die Personalentwicklung spielen folgende Verfahren eine wichtige Rolle: pe...

Trotz des Wandels der Arbeitswelt nimmt die Erwerbsarbeit immer noch eine zentrale Stellung im Leben ein, denn sie dient der Sicherung des Lebensunterhaltes einer Person und ihrer Familie. Sie strukturiert die Zeit, schafft soziale Kontakte außerhalb der Familie, vermittelt soziale Teilhabe, sie gibt persönliche Identität und schafft sozialen Statu...

Personalmarketing soll potenziell geeignete Arbeitskräfte identifizieren, sie auf die Organisation und die dortigen Arbeitsplätze aufmerksam machen und sie zu einer Bewerbung ermutigen sowie diejenigen Personen, die von der Organisation ausgewählt und eingestellt wurden und die sich als geeignet erwiesen haben, langfristig an die Organisation binde...

Personalauswahl besteht darin, dass für einen Arbeitsplatz mehrere Personen zur Verfügung stehen und dabei im Sinne der Interessen und Ziele der Organisation zu entscheiden ist, welche Person ein Stellenangebot erhält. Das Ziel der Personalauswahl sollte es sein, eine sog. Passung zu erreichen. Hierbei sind die qualifikatorische, die bedürfnisbezog...

Mithilfe der personalpsychologischen Anforderungsanalyse sollen erfolgskritische Personenmerkmale identifiziert werden. Die Anforderungsanalyse ist ein Hilfsmittel für die Personalsuche, Personalauswahl, Personalbeurteilung und Personalentwicklung. Durch eine systematische Anforderungsanalyse lässt sich die Objektivität, Genauigkeit und Gültigkeit...

Es geht um die objektive Beschreibung, Messung, Erklärung und Prognose des Erlebens und Verhaltens in Organisationen und an der Schnittstelle zu Organisationen. Fragestellungen aus der Praxis und vorausgegangene wissenschaftliche Forschung führen auf der Basis von Theorien zur Formulierung von Hypothesen. Hypothesen werden mittels experimenteller o...

Aufgrund des Zurechnungsproblems wird die Arbeitsleistung einer Person nicht über die tatsächlichen Arbeitsergebnisse dieser Person definiert, sondern darüber, in welchem Ausmaß eine Person in ihrer Tätigkeit Verhaltensweisen zeigt, die nach übereinstimmender Meinung der Arbeitsplatzexperten mit hoher Wahrscheinlichkeit zu positiven Ergebnissen für...

Individuals high in psychopathy are often portrayed as more likely to display antisocial behaviour in the workplace and to demonstrate lower job performance. Current research on the impact of trait psychopathy in the workplace is characterized by divergent findings of moderate versus weak effects. We aim to address two potential causes for these di...

Politisches Verhalten ist im Projektalltag allgegenwärtig. Ursächlich hierfür sind erstens das Vorliegen von Handlungs-, Planungs- und Entscheidungsunsicherheiten, zweitens die häufig unzureichende Ausstattung mit notwendigen Ressourcen und drittens die Abhängigkeit von unterschiedlichen Stakeholdergruppen, die häufig sich widersprechende Interesse...

Individual-level political will in organizations and careers is recognized by many scholars as an important yet under-investigated construct. Only recently has a scale directly assessing political will been developed, and its validation process has just begun (Kapoutsis, Papalexandris, Treadway, & Bentley, 2017). We used the Trait-Reputation-Identi...

Although the link between facial appearance and success is well established, the mechanisms responsible for this association have remained elusive. Evolutionary theory suggests that perceived leadership characteristics should be important for men’s self-concept. Drawing on implicit leadership theory and evolutionary perspectives, we therefore exami...

Psychopathie am Arbeitsplatz ist ein Thema, das in den letzten Jahren in diversen Managementfibeln, Printmedien, Onlinezeitschriften, Blogs und Ratgeberseiten viel Beachtung gefunden hat. Dabei beschreiben viele dieser populärwissenschaftlichen Publikationen den „Psychopathen“ als raffiniert, herzlos und ohne Hemmungen sowie als belastend und schäd...

Political skill, a social competence that enables individuals to achieve goals due to their understanding of and influence upon others at work, can play an important role in manager performance. We argue that the political skill – manager performance relationship varies as a nonlinear function of differing levels of enterprising job demands (i.e.,...

Psychopathen gelten im allgemeinen als herzlose Menschen mit hoher krimineller Energie. Wie eine neue Studie zeigt, ist das Persönlichkeitsbild der Psychopathie jedoch äußerst vielschichtig: Höhere Intelligenz und eine erfolgreiche Bildungskarriere können beruflichen Erfolg und gesellschaftliche Akzeptanz maßgeblich beeinflussen.

In a prospective study of 150 junior salespeople in the same company, we examined the relation between fearless dominance, which is a dimension of trait psychopathy (Lilienfeld & Fowler, 2006), and objective performance in field sales. After controlling for demographic variables, length of job tenure, initial sales training quality, and disciplined...

In recent years, personal initiative has been found to predict job performance. However, implicit in this direct initiative–performance relationship are more complex process dynamics that can be better understood when contextual antecedents, moderators, and mediators are considered. Drawing from perspectives of proactive behavior as a goal-directed...

Both trait activation and socioanalytic personality theories clarify the personality – performance relationship at work. We argue that extraversion needs to be interactively combined with both social competency (socioanalytic theory) and an activating context (trait activation theory) to demonstrate effects on a relevant type of work performance. S...

Bürokratisches Organisieren beruht auf einem grundlegenden Bedürfnis vieler Menschen nach geräuschlosem und glatten Funktionieren ihres Alltags. Welche Erscheinungsformen, Techniken und Elemente zeigt die Bürokratie in organisatorischer Hinsicht, und wie gehen Menschen im Beruf damit um.

Zu arbeiten ist in unseren heutigen westlichen Gesellschaften ein selbstverständliches Anliegen der meisten Erwachsenen. Der Stellenwert von Arbeit in unserer Kultur ist aber nicht in Stein gemeißelt und hat sich im Laufe der Jahrhunderte immer wieder verändert und ist auch für Menschen verschiedener Kulturen unterschiedlich. Durch die politischen...

On the basis of Lykken’s (1995) two-factor theory of trait psychopathy, we examined how self-centered impulsivity and fearless domi¬nance were related to the achievement (or lack of achievement) of organizational goals (i.e., task performance and counterproductive work behavior directed toward the organization). We expected that self-centered impul...

Academic curriculum vitae of Gerhard Blickle

Researchers have yet to precisely test the Socioanalytic proposition that social skill moderates the personality identity – personality reputation relationship. Further, although research has found personality to have both explicit and implicit aspects, scholars have not examined these differences with respect to the Socioanalytic perspective on pe...

Although prior research indicated that extraversion and conscientiousness are uniformly beneficial to sales performance, recent evidence suggests that scholars should consider nonlinearity, narrow personality, social skill, and the research context in the personality-performance relation. Further, scholars have found conscientiousness to have inver...

Zusammenfassung. In letzter Zeit mehren sich Hinweise darauf, dass gehauft falsch-positive Befunde in wissenschaftlichen Publikationen berichtet werden und so die Forschungsliteratur ein verzerrtes Bild der Realitat widerspiegelt. Das Fachkollegium Psychologie der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft hat dieses Problem aufgegriffen und die moglichen Ur...

Socioanalytic theory of personality provides a perspective on human nature based on insights from: Charles Darwin about human evolution; Sigmund Freud about unconscious motivation; and George Herbert Mead about the dynamics of social interaction. This chapter presents the basic assumptions of socioanalytic personality theory, reviews supporting emp...

Scholars have raised concerns that openness to experience has ambiguous relationships with performance. In this study, we examine both openness and one of its more narrow dimensions, learning approach. In addition, the research context was made narrow (i.e., higher education academic performance in science), and social skill was interactively combi...

Schütte, N., Blickle, G., Frieder, R., Schnitzler, F., & Heupel, J. (2015). Political skill moderates the success of psychopaths at the workplace.75th Annual Conference of the Academy of Mangement at Vancoover, Brit. Columb., CAN. 7-11. August, 2015.

This paper presents the basic assumptions of socioanalytic personality theory, reviews supporting empirical evidence and practical implications of the theory.

Political behavior is an integral part of the everyday routine of any project. There are three main reasons for politicking in this context: (1) Ambiguity in respect to actions, planning, and decisions; (2) the frequently insufficient allocation of vital resources; (3) dependence on different groups of stakeholders with inconsistent interests and o...

Scholars have raised concerns that openness to experience has ambiguous relationships with performance. In the present study, we examine both openness and one of its more narrow dimensions, learning approach. In addition, the research context was made narrow (i.e., higher education academic performance in science), and social skill was interactivel...

The purpose of this study was to examine the relations of two facets of psychopathic personality (i.e., self-centered impulsivity, fearless dominance) with counterproductive work behavior (CWB-I) and contextual performance (CP). Consistent with research on psychopathy, we suggested that self-centered impulsivity (i.e., behavioral impulsivity charac...

Prior research on the benefits of modest self-presentation in organizational contexts has shown positive effects on several career-related outcomes, including employees’ reputation, organizational support, and mentoring. However, little is known about the nature, mechanisms, and boundary conditions of this promising impression management tactic. Ou...

The personality factor of extraversion has been associated with performance in some occupations (e.g., sales), and it has been one of the most consistent personality predictors of leadership. Recent research indicates that extraversion could have a non-linear relation with performance. At the same time, many researchers have contended that scholars...