Abstract
We explore the impact of victims’ narcissism on their emotional responses to workplace victimization, specifically, anger and hope. In Study 1 (N = 271; health and social services organization employees), instrumented regression analysis revealed the associations between perceived workplace victimization and victims’ hope and anger to be negative and positive, respectively, among grandiose narcissists. Neither emotion mediated the victimization-performance association using time-separated measurement from supervisors (subsample N = 148). In Study 2 (N = 369; adults who have experienced workplace victimization), grandiose narcissism was associated positively with other-focused hope in an incident recall exercise yet not with anger, and associated negatively with two coping behaviors. Vulnerable narcissism was associated positively with both hope and anger, as well as a variety of coping behaviors. In a randomized scenario experiment (subsample N = 171), grandiose narcissism was associated negatively with hope and positively with anger only when independent self-construal was primed, whereas vulnerable narcissism was associated more strongly with both emotions when interdependent self-construal was primed. Across both studies, we conclude chronic activation of independent self-construal may ‘insulate’ grandiose narcissists from the socio-contextual cues needed to generate emotional responses that would facilitate effective coping in the face of workplace victimization. Further, though both variants of narcissism demonstrated maladaptive coping in the face of a severe social threat, vulnerable narcissists may possess a stronger potential for adaptive coping than grandiose narcissists, owing to their elevated feelings of hope.
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Notes
Victimization regressed with statistical significance (p < 0.05) on the instrument, political skill, in both the anger and hope model in both full and subsample analyses, as expected.
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Bentley, J.R., Treadway, D.C. The victimized narcissist: anger, hope, and self-construal. Curr Psychol 43, 17684–17699 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-05717-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-05717-y