Personality and Conflict on Teams

In this project, we examine how personality characteristics contribute to status conflict in work teams. Specifically, we examine how and why personalities driven by a grandiose sense of self - narcissists - may contribute to or reduce conflict based on one's relative position within a status hierarchy. To do so, we examine agentic and communal narcissists, those who respectively support their grandiose personalities through behaviors that confirm their agentic or communal superiority. We hypothesize that the drive to claim credit for behaviors to confirm one's superiority that is at the heart of narcissistic self-regulation is not ubiquitous across all contexts. Instead, narcissistic demands are conditional on the types of tasks and feedback that work groups find themselves, suggesting that narcissism is positively related to status conflict in some context, whereas negatively related to it in others.