Do difficult personalities end up in HR? What the research shows

People high on honesty-humility tend to be sincere, fair, modest and unmaterialistic. People low on it tend to be deceptive, entitled and covetous – and, Dunlop says, motivated by power, sex and money, which can draw them towards roles that confer power over others.

“So the destructive side of that personality trait is just destructive,” he said. “As far as I can see, there’s no upside to it.”

A 2024 meta-analysis in the Journal of Applied Psychology by Anoop Javalagi of Northwestern University and Daniel Newman and Mengtong Li of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign supports that view. Honesty-humility correlated with leader effectiveness at 0.25. Adding it to the Big Five more than doubled the share of variation in leader effectiveness explained, from 4 per cent to 10 per cent – although the honesty-humility estimate drew on only eight samples.

The risk, Dunlop says, is that low honesty-humility candidates are often the most persuasive in the room. “But the thing is, the short-term gains are often offset by the long-term destruction. And they’re quite good at being very charming and able to convince, say, a board that they’ve got the answers.”

What happens when the investigator is the problem?

Dunlop’s own research shows which traits make colleagues hardest to work with. In a 2025 study in the Journal of Research in Personality, he and Felix Kerscher and Reinout de Vries of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam asked 297 working adults from 31 nationalities to describe someone they liked and someone they disliked, at work and outside it.