Do Narcissists and High Machs More Empowered? Assessing the Relationship between Machiavellianism and Narcissism, and Psychological Empowerment

Abstract

Given the abundant individual and organizational outcomes of empowerment, identifying employees who can be more empowered than others can be quite beneficial for organizations. The goal of this study was to test the relationship between both Narcissism and Machiavellianism, and psychological empowerment. To do so, 223 front-line service workers working in different industries in tertiary sector in Iran were selected and data was collected using self-reported questionnaire. The results indicated that by affecting three cognitions of impact, self-determination, and competence/self-efficacy, Narcissism positively relates to psychological empowerment. Despite the significant positive relationship between Machiavellianism and the cognition of impact, unexpectedly, no significant link between Machiavellianism and overall measure of psychological empowerment was found. This was attributed to significant negative relationship between Machiavellianism and empowerment's dimension of meaning. Identifying individual differences, such as Narcissism, which are positively related to empowerment can be tremendously useful during human resource selection. In other words, the result suggests that employing individuals with some degree of healthy Narcissism can be quite fruitful for the organizations especially those operating in the service sector.