1. Hedge Fund Managers With Psychopathic Tendencies Make for Worse Investors
- Author
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Leanne ten Brinke, Dacher Keltner, and Aimee Kish
- Subjects
Male ,050103 clinical psychology ,Social Psychology ,Financial Management ,Personality Inventory ,Psychopathy ,050109 social psychology ,Choice Behavior ,Hedge fund ,Nonverbal communication ,Empirical research ,medicine ,Humans ,Machiavellianism ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,Investments ,Dark triad ,business.industry ,05 social sciences ,medicine.disease ,Leadership ,Leadership studies ,Absolute return ,Narcissism ,Volatility (finance) ,Psychology ,business ,Social psychology - Abstract
It is widely assumed that psychopathic personality traits promote success in high-powered, competitive contexts such as financial investment. By contrast, empirical studies find that psychopathic leaders can be charming and persuasive, but poor performers who mismanage, bully, and engage in unethical behavior. By coding nonverbal behaviors displayed in semistructured interviews, we identified the psychopathic, Machiavellian, and narcissistic tendencies in 101 hedge fund managers, and examined whether these traits were associated with financial performance over the course of 10 diverse years of economic volatility (2005-2015). Managers with greater psychopathic tendencies produced lower absolute returns than their less psychopathic peers, and managers with greater narcissistic traits produced decreased risk-adjusted returns. The discussion focuses on the costs of Dark Triad traits in financial investment, and organizational leadership more generally.
- Published
- 2017