OXFORD, Miss. – Companies may be unwittingly recruiting narcissistic employees through their choice of words in job postings, according to a new study on corporate recruitment language.
Using words or phrases such as "results-oriented," "ambitious" and "persuasive" attracts applicants who are more willing to engage in unethical behavior to get results, according to a study published in Management Science .
"That's what you would expect a narcissist to do – be willing to bend the rules, at least for themselves," said Jonathan Gay, assistant professor of accountancy instruction, who led the research effort. "And it starts with your job posting. Who are you attracting with your job postings?"
Narcissists have been shown to be poor leaders. For accounting firms and many other businesses, narcissistic employees are more likely to engage in fraud and earnings management, which is when employees bend rules to make businesses seem to perform better than they actually do.
Earnings management is controversial in the field because, despite often being legal, it could be considered a dishonest representation of a company's performance or worth.
"Narcissism, for whatever reason, has proven to be the dominant personality trait that is associated with earnings management, fraud and manipulation," said Scott Jackson, professor of accounting at the University of South Carolina Darla Moore School of Business.
"A narcissist would be more likely to get entangled in serious accounting infractions than someone who doesn't have that personality trait."
Outside the accounting field, however, hiring a narcissist isn't always a bad thing, Gay said.
"If you want salesmen that are going to go be innovative and sell a bunch of your goods, you may want a narcissist for that," he said. "It's been shown that executives are typically high in narcissism."
For one portion of the study, 248 participants selected which job postings were most attractive to them. The same participants took the Narcissistic Personality Inventory-16 test, one of the most widely used nonclinical personality measures for the trait.
The researchers compared which job postings and key phrases people chose to the people who scored higher narcissism.
Although it's unlikely that any of the participants have a clinical narcissistic personality disorder, the test does show an elevated narcissistic tendency, the researchers said.
"All three of us are accounting professors, but we also recognize that this has broader implications throughout other organizations," Gay said. "We thought that people higher in narcissism are going to be attracted to these terms because, theoretically, it matches their personality.
"You can tie these terms to kind of exactly what makes them higher in narcissism."
While some of the words and phrases that attract narcissists may seem common – such as "thinking outside the box" and "creative" – it is important to understand those words and phrases in the context of the job, Jackson said.
"It would be desirable if accountants report what really happened," he said. "If you're results-oriented in an accounting setting, you might doctor numbers so that the numbers represent something that didn't happen but is desirable to report.
"Calling someone a 'creative accountant' is kind of a euphemism for someone who tells accounting fibs. When you see a creative accountant, that wouldn't be a compliment. That would basically say this person is willing to distort numbers in order to report what they want to see instead of what's actually there."
Ultimately, whether a company wants to attract narcissists depends on its needs, Gay said. But recruiters and employers should be aware that the words they use matter.
"So, if you want somebody who is going to be ambitious and self-reliant and maybe a little narcissistic, then include this language," he said. "But if you want somebody that's going to report the most accurate representation of your financial statements, not the most favorable representation, then you might want to be cautious about using some of these rule-bender terms in your job listings."
