An Other Perspective on Five Factor Machiavellianism

Previous research has found that traditional assessments of Machiavellianism have insufficient construct coverage and strongly overlap with psychopathy. Tackling these issues, Collison et al. developed the Five Factor Machiavellianism Inventory (FFMI), comprising antagonism, agency, and planfulness. Research by Kückelhaus et al. strongly supports the FFMI's construct validity. However, both of these previous studies share the limitation of common source bias. Therefore, in this study, target participants provided the FFMI self-assessments and coworkers assessed targets in terms of social competency, vocational environments, and occupational success. In a sample of 425 target-coworker dyads, we found that the traditional measures of MACH show a high degree of similarity with psychopathy, while the FFMI is discriminant from psychopathy and shows divergence from traditional measures of MACH with reference to coworker ratings of social competencies, vocational environments, and occupational success. Finally, we explored the interactive relations of the FFMI factors as emergent interpersonal syndromes. The number of significant interactions (18%) clearly exceeded a false positive rate of 5%. Implications and limitations are discussed.