Blinded By the Light: The Dark Side of Traditionally Desirable Personality Traits

摘要

Guenole (2014) argues that organizational scholars should embrace the newly developed personality model from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th ed. (DSM-5; APA, 2013). We agree with Guenole that organizational psychologists would benefit from further assimilation of maladaptive traits into the personality spectrum, as it would create a more thorough and nuanced representation of personality. However, whereas Guenole's intent is to steer our focus towards DSM personality traits, we propose an alternative perspective to the study of maladaptive traits. Specifically, we extend Guenole's argument that maladaptive traits are deserving of additional scholarly work by proposing that it is also useful to examine whether personality traits that are traditionally considered to be desirable (e.g., Conscientiousness) become maladaptive when one has "too much of a good thing" (e.g., a conscientious individual who is so perfectionistic that he/she cannot complete a task; Pierce & Aguinis, 2013).