Peter D Harms

University of Alabama | UA · Department of Management

Insider threats represent a serious threat to organizations but are considered to be difficult to predict and prevent. Although a growing body of research has examined personological antecedents to insider threats, this literature lacks a unifying theoretical perspective connecting the characteristics that have been researched. In addition to catal...

Research in personality and organizational psychology has begun to investigate a novel evaluative trait known as perceived normality, defined as an overall perception that one is normal (vs. strange or weird). The current work evaluates a brief measure of this trait (i.e., a “weirdness scale”), extending past work by assessing both self-reports and...

Workers who are exposed to severe situations such as death, harassment, and others' suffering at work are vulnerable to symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and severe distress. This distress may extend to their intimate partners, despite their lack of firsthand experience with the traumatic stressors. Although theory and empirical rese...

Insider threats are a pernicious threat to modern organizations that involve individuals intentionally or unintentionally engaging in behaviors that undermine or abuse information security. Previous research has established that personality factors are an important determinant of the likelihood that an individual will engage in insider threat behav...

Purpose Although there have been considerable amounts of research documenting the effects of narcissism on workplace outcomes, studies of the impact of narcissism on job performance have produced inconclusive results. This study aims to provide insight into this issue by using a new model of narcissism, the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Conce...

Determining whether different items provide the same information or mean the same thing within a population is a central concern when determining whether different scales or constructs are overlapping or redundant. In the present study, we suggest that retest-adjusted correlations provide a valuable means of adjusting for item-level unreliability....

We describe how the effects of situational factors on psychological processes and behavior can be formally represented through field models created from elaborated situational judgment test (ESJT) data. As we detail, ESJTs ‘elaborate’ on standard SJTs by (1) having participants rate the expected outcomes of different responses to a given situation,...

Concerns about why and under what circumstances individuals would relinquish their own freedoms and put their faith in autocratic leaders are re-emerging as an important topic in the field of leadership research. In the present review, the authors cover the history of research on authoritarianism, the developmental origins of authoritarian values,...

Organizational scholars increasingly realize the importance of a dark personality in the workplace. Although a great deal has been learned in terms of the utility of dark personality for the prediction of workplace outcomes, the field has yet to consolidate in terms of which models and measures best reflect the nature of dark personality traits. To...

Despite widespread belief that passion is important for workplace success, research has failed to keep pace with theorizing in this domain, particularly as it pertains to measurement. The Dualistic Model of Passion, which is comprised of harmonious passion (HP) and obsessive passion (OP), has been frequently adapted by management researchers. Two d...

Ambition is often considered to have a dualistic nature, associated with both being a driver of success and a cause of personal downfalls. However, there is little understanding of what factors may lead to which outcomes. Drawing upon socioanalytic theory, we hypothesize and test a mediation model in which ambition impacts transformational leadersh...

The study of emotional intelligence (EI) in the field of leadership, and in the organizational sciences in general, has often been characterized by controversy and criticism. But the study of EI has nonetheless persisted by developing new measures and models to address these concerns. In a prior letter exchange by Antonakis, Ashkanasy, and Dasborou...

A growing body of conceptual and empirical research has drawn on transactive memory systems (TMS) theory to understand the functioning of a wide range of teams, including top management teams (TMTs). At the same time, there has been increasing interest in how personality factors, and in particular chief executive officer (CEO) narcissism, shape cor...

Narcissism is widely considered to be a trait that is commonly found in leaders, but also a characteristic that is frequently a source of problems for their organizations. However, there is accumulating consensus in the organizational literature that, rather than a necessary evil, narcissism can potentially be a mixed blessing for leaders. The pres...

We draw on the drift hypothesis and latent deprivation model to guide comparisons between Turkers who report no employment other than crowdsourced work (i.e., otherwise unemployed) and Turkers who report being part-time and full-time employed outside of crowdsourced work. Findings show otherwise unemployed Turkers and part-time employed Turkers rep...

Personality traits are regularly described as a person's characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and in turn it is regularly assumed that individuals think, feel, and do things they perceive to be most functional. Here, we elaborate on earlier discussions of how functional field models can be used to more rigorously model the...

In the past 20 years, the study of dark personality has seen a surge of interest among both academic researchers and practitioners. Although the research to date has documented that dark personality characteristics are important predictors of workplace behaviors and outcomes, there remain considerable challenges in the field in terms of both theori...

Machiavellianism (Mach) and subclinical psychopathy are two widely studied antagonistic personality traits with distinct theoretical conceptualizations. Mach is conceptualized by strategic deviousness, cynicism, and pragmatic morality, whereas subclinical psychopathy is conceptualized by impulsive antisocial tendencies, callousness, and rule-breaki...

Crowd-based labor has been widely implemented to solve human resource shortages cost-effectively and creatively. However, while investigations into the benefits of crowd-based labor for organizations exist, our understanding of how crowd-based labor practices influence crowd-based worker justice perceptions and worker turnover is notably underdevel...

This entry provides a compact review of the evidence that personality characteristics are related to deviant work behaviors, with special attention directed at counterproductive work behaviors and abusive supervision. In particular, the roles that the Big Five personality traits, the attachment system, and dark personality characteristics play in t...

This entry provides a review of how personality is used in military settings for selection as well as the effectiveness of personality constructs for predicting performance, training, attrition, leadership, and health outcomes. It also provides evidence concerning the effectiveness of developmental interventions designed to increase mental health,...

This entry provides a review of how personality is used in military settings for selection as well as the effectiveness of personality constructs for predicting performance, training, attrition, leadership, and health outcomes. It also provides evidence concerning the effectiveness of developmental interventions designed to increase mental health,...

This entry provides a compact review of the evidence that personality characteristics are related to deviant work behaviors, with special attention directed at counterproductive work behaviors and abusive supervision. In particular, the roles that the Big Five personality traits, the attachment system, and dark personality characteristics play in t...

The present study draws from Person-Environment (P-E) Fit theory to examine the relationship between Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) and self-employment status as well as the potential for gender to moderate this relationship. Two-wave archival data involving 29,000 respondents of a representative sample provided overall support for our pre...

We explore how variation in fatal automobile crashes across small geographic areas is associated with geographic variation in self-rated psychological and behavioral characteristics. Specifically, estimates of ZIP-code-level automobile fatality rates were linked to a separate dataset comprising 2.8 million responses to a widely used self-report per...

Individuals with dominant personality tend to be perceived as leaders, but some theory suggests the dominance advantage for leadership might depend upon gender. Role congruity theory (Eagly & Karau, 2002) holds that gender role-incongruence (i.e., dominant personality traits among women) can be a liability, which we propose produces a dominance-gen...

Bringing the review process into the 21st century: Post-publication peer review - Volume 13 Issue 1 - P. D. Harms, Marcus Credé

In this study we draw from Conservation of Resources theory and the narcissism literature to examine why and when narcissistic leaders develop and maintain differentiated social relationships with followers in a group setting, therefore demotivating follower voice. Using data from 457 employees and their 95 supervisors working at a large Chinese co...

Claiming that high levels of an independent variable represent a necessary-but-not-sufficient condition for an outcome suggests that the outcome is only possible – but not guaranteed – with high levels of that variable. Necessary condition analysis (NCA) allows researchers to determine if an observed relation between an independent variable and a d...

This article describes the results from a meta-analytic review of 55 studies and 78 independent samples containing information about the demographic, contextual, and psychological factors associated with alcohol and drug abuse among United States military personnel. In terms of demographics, results from this analysis reveal higher levels of substa...

Prior research on the personality characteristics of truck drivers and accident involvement has relied primarily on the Big Five personality factors (e.g., Extraversion), and has largely focused on self-reported number of accidents rather than more objective, independent records. We examined the association between personality characteristics and a...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide an investigation of how different types of gig workers engage in the gig economy. Specifically, the authors distinguish between workers who view gig work as primary income (or not) and those workers who view it as a job (or not). Design/methodology/approach – In total, 1,190 Mechanical Turk (MTurk)...

Just because it’s dark doesn’t mean that we can’t go there - Volume 12 Issue 2 - P. D. Harms, Dustin Wood, Justin A. DeSimone

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the effectiveness of transformational leadership behaviors are moderated by a country’s cultural values and cultural practices. Design/methodology/approach The authors describe a meta-analytic review of the relationship between transformational leadership and employee performance (task...

The field of personality development almost exclusively relies on nomothetic measures (i.e., measures that are designed to capture universal, shared characteristics). Over-reliance on nomothetic measures can neglect important, individualized aspects of personality that are not captured with standard nomothetic measures. The current study takes an i...

The influence of a candidate’s physical appearance on interview evaluations is well documented. However, few models exist that explain how and why specific components of physical appearance influence interviewer perceptions. We address this discrepancy by identifying the primary components of appearance and integrating findings from the appearance...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to describe common questionable research practices (QRPs) engaged in by management researchers who use confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) as part of their analysis. Design/methodology/approach The authors describe seven questionable analytic practices and then review one year of journal articles published in...

Profile approaches to operationalizing person-organization (P-O) fit as the within-person correlation between an individual’s ideal organization characteristics and their actual organization characteristics regularly find strong associations between P-O fit and an individual’s work attitudes. However, profile correlation indices and other overall i...

The purpose of this study is to empirically address questions pertaining to the effects of data screening practices in survey research. This study addresses questions about the impact of screening techniques on data and statistical analyses. It also serves an initial attempt to estimate descriptive statistics and graphically display the distributio...

Acute and chronic pain affects more Americans than heart disease, diabetes, and cancer combined. Conservative estimates suggest the total economic cost of pain in the United States is $600 billion, and more than half of this cost is due to lost productivity, such as absenteeism, presenteeism, and turnover. In addition, an escalating opioid epidemic...

Both scholars and the popular press have expressed concern regarding the potential prevalence of individuals with psychopathic tendencies in corporate leadership positions and the negative effects they may have on both individual workers and their organizations as a whole. However, research to date has been inconclusive as to whether such individua...

Increasing evidence suggests employees are turning to the nonprescribed use of stimulants to supplement their performance. We sit in a unique position regarding stimulants in the workforce. They are easily available, there is little stigma attached to use, and there is little information regarding the long-term safety effects of use. With that in m...

We propose the recently introduced implicit measure of psychological capital (PsyCap), the Implicit Psychological Capital Questionnaire (I-PCQ; Harms & Luthans, 2012), can provide a needed valid alternative to the self-report Psychological Capital Questionnaire (PCQ). We explain the development of the I-PCQ items, assess the structural validity of...

Although Miner et al. (2018) effectively argue that there is a need for greater efforts on the part of I-O psychologists to confront gender inequity in the STEM fields, we feel that the preoccupation with STEM may blind us to other domains where similar issues not only exist but may be even more prevalent and problematic. Specifically, we would arg...

The effects of music on human performance have been studied across many disciplines. Music has been shown to impact task performance, organizational citizenship behaviors, and learning (i.e., training), but the implications of the study of music in the workplace have not yet been fully realized. Therefore, we conduct an interdisciplinary review of...

Although narcissists are commonly compared to “emotional vampires” who drain others of their energy, research examining the impact of narcissistic leadership on employee well-being and outcomes remain scant. Drawing from conservation of resources (COR) theory, we theorize that narcissistic leadership consumes employees' emotional and cognitive reso...

The question of whether academic research should emphasize scientific rigor, practical relevance, or both simultaneously has been hotly debated in HRM research and other related disciplines for much of the past century. That said, empirical investigations of whether these values are mutually exclusive or compatible are surprisingly rare. Moreover,...

One of the key characteristics of a rigorous and robust science is that it has the ability to self-correct when mistakes are made. The focal article by Grand et al. (2018) has plenty to say about what faithful actors can do to ensure a more robust industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology literature, but we were surprised at how little attenti...

Drawing from belongingness theory, the present study proposes and empirically tests the impact of leader narcissism on employees’ citizenship and antagonistic behaviors via their organization-based self-esteem (OBSE) depending on conditions of leader consultation behaviors. Survey data collected from 262 leader-employee dyads at a large Chinese inf...

Short measures are commonly used when conducting research involving emotions. However, obtaining appropriate estimates of reliability for short measures is traditionally problematic and is a reoccurring concern in emotion research. To address this issue, we compare the within-session test-retest and factor analysis methods for estimating the reliab...

The functionalist understanding that an individual’s behavioral tendencies are shaped by their value toward attaining the individual’s valued ends underlies many theories of how personality traits interact with aspects of the situation. However, functional explanations are frequently unformalized, which in addition to their tendency to tolerate mor...

Despite a long history within the field of leadership, the subject of authoritarianism and how it influences leadership and leadership processes has been neglected in recent decades. However, recent global events make it clear that a better understanding of authoritarianism is needed and that leadership researchers would benefit from a renewed inte...

Recent years have seen a renewed interest in insufficient effort responding (IER). Previous research has demonstrated that IER can have detrimental effects on survey research ranging from introducing untrustworthy data to influencing psychometric and statistical results. The present simulations examine two forms of IER, straightlining (SL) and rand...

In the present study, we examine the process through which abusive supervision impacts employee creativity. Specifically, we test whether abusive supervision is associated with lower levels of employee creativity and if this effect is mediated by employee sleep deprivation and emotional exhaustion. Results showed that abusive supervision had an ind...

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is becoming a prevalent source of quick and cost effective data for organizational research, but there are questions about the appropriateness of the platform for organizational research. To answer these questions, we conducted an integrative review based on 75 papers evaluating the MTurk platform and 250 MTurk sample...

Through social exchange, leaders can offer relational support or resources to facilitate employees proactive attempts to bring positive change (voice) or novel ideas (creativity) and behaviors (innovative behavior) to their work. We consider these three outcomes under the same nomological network as they all represent employees idea contribution to...

We examine the appropriateness of response speed and response consistency as data quality indicators within online samples. Across several inventories, results show that response consistency decreases dramatically at response rates faster than 1 second per item. Our results suggest that careless responding may be fairly common in online samples and...

It is widely appreciated that extraversion is associated with greater subjective well-being. What is not yet clear is what mechanisms relate the two. In two longitudinal studies, we explored whether extraversion is prospectively associated with higher levels of satisfaction during college through influencing college social experiences using longitu...

Although the effects of personality traits on social environments are regularly thought to mirror the effects of social environments on personality traits, the causal dynamics existing between personality traits and social power may represent an important exception. Using a sample of 181 fraternity and sorority members surveyed over a year, we show...

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 leadersh...

Stress has been implicated as an important determinant of leadership functioning. Conversely, the behavior of leaders has long been argued to be a major factor in determining the stress levels of followers. Yet despite the widespread acknowledgement that stress and leadership are linked, there has been no systematic attempt to organize and summariz...

Mõttus alerts us to the widespread predictive heterogeneity of different indicators of the same trait. This heterogeneity violates the assumption that traits have causal unity in their developmental antecedents and effects on outcomes. I would go a step further: broader traits are useful units for description and prediction but not for explaining p...

In this set of studies, we conduct an initial validation of the Implicit Psychological Capital Questionnaire-Health (IPCQ-H), a short, easy to administer and score measure of psychological capital designed to reflect implicit schemas or cognitions surrounding one's health. The results of two studies demonstrate that the implicit measure of IPCQ-H i...

Grit has been presented as a higher order personality trait that is highly predictive of both success and performance and distinct from other traits such as conscientiousness. This paper provides a meta-analytic review of the grit literature with a particular focus on the structure of grit and the relation between grit and performance, retention, c...

We appreciate the authors of the target article (Britt, Shen, Sinclair, Grossman, & Klieger, 2016) shining a spotlight on the important work being done in the study of resilience and providing a historical overview of how resilience has been conceptualized and assessed in the past. To add to this review, we would briefly like to comment on current...

The current study utilizes attachment theory to understand how leader–follower relationships impact emotional and behavioral outcomes in the workplace. Specifically, we examine the roles of two dysfunctional attachment styles – anxious and avoidant attachment – as determinants of trust in leaders, stress and citizenship behaviors. Results showed th...

It has been argued that approximations of narrow traits can be made through linear combinations of broad traits such as the Big Five personality traits. Indeed, Hough and Ones (200119. Hough, L. M., & Ones, D. S. (2001). The structure, measurement, validity, & use of personality variables in industrial, work, and organizational psychology. In N. An...

The 24-item Abbreviated Character Strengths Test (ACST) was developed to efficiently measure character strengths (Peterson, Park, & Castro, 201139. Peterson, C., Park, N., & Castro, C. A. (2011). Assessment for the US Army Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program: The Global Assessment Tool. American Psychologist, 66, 10–18.View all references). Howev...

The current paper examines how the stories can shape the leadership and followership schemas of children. We explore how television programs can shape attitudes towards leaders as well as providing role models for effective or desirable leadership and followership behaviors. In particular, we use personality assessments of characters from the popul...

Although we share Bergman and Jean's (2016) concerns about the representativeness of samples in the organizational sciences, we are mindful of the ever changing nature of the job market. New jobs are created from technological innovation while others become obsolete and disappear or are functionally transformed. These shifts in employment patterns...

This article introduces a new measure of resilience and five related protective factors. The Five-by-Five Resilience Scale (5×5RS) is developed on the basis of theoretical and empirical considerations. Two samples (N = 475 and N = 613) are used to assess the factor structure, reliability, convergent validity, and criterion-related validity of the 5...

Early adulthood is a developmentally important time period, with many novel life events needing to be traversed for the first time. Despite this important transition period, few studies examine the development of moral decision-making processes during this critical life stage. In the present study, college students completed moral decision-making m...