Niccolò Machiavelli is credited with inspiring the MACH IV personality assessment instrument, which has been adopted widely in management, both public and private. The personality this instrument maps is manipulative, deceitful, immoral, and self-centred. The instrument emerged in 1970 and created a minor industry. There are at least eighty empirical studies in management that involved more than 14,000 subjects. Richard Christie, who created the scale, has said that it is derived from the works of Machiavelli. In a standard debriefing after (...) completing this scale, respondents would be told it concerns the Machiavellian personality. We argue that the Machiavellian personality in MACH IV has little, if anything, to do with Machiavelli, either the man or his works. If Machiavelli is alleged to be relevant to management, we argue that this personality assessment instrument does not demonstrate such relevance. To advance this case we first describe the development of the instrument, identifying some of the assumptions upon which it rests; then we assess each of its twenty items against Machiavelli’s texts. Wefind fewer than half of the items have even a tenuous connection with Machiavelli’s works, yet the instrument bears his name. Against this spurious Machiavelli we juxtapose another twenty passages from The Prince, showing a much more complex and subtle thinker than the one-dimensional cipher in the MACH IV scale. Machiavelli studies have done much to dispel the cloud of mythology around the man and his reputation, and we hope to do the same to MACHIV. In the name of intellectual honesty and sound scholarship, we urge management scholars to take note of this distortion of Machiavelli, and where possible address it, and that users of the MACH IV scale distinguish the man, Machiavelli, and his works from this instrument. (shrink)

Prior research has demonstrated that accountants differ from the general population on many personality traits. Understanding accountants’ personality traits is important when these characteristics may impact professional behavior or ability to work with members of the business community. Our study investigates the relationship between Machiavellianism, ethical orientation, anti-intellectualism, and social desirability response bias in Canadian accountants. We find that Canadian accountants score much higher on the Machiavellianism scale than U.S. accountants. Additionally, our results show a significant relationship between Machiavellianism and (...) relativism, idealism, anti-intellectualism, and social desirability response bias. Our results indicate that professional Canadian accountants may not share the same personality characteristics as U.S. accountants. We extend previous research investigating Canadian accountants, by explicitly recognizing the impact of social desirability response bias, and by including anti-intellectualism. (shrink)

Research suggests a direct negative relationship between peers’ unethical behavior and employees’ ethical intention. But several possible mechanisms might explain this relationship in more detail. For example, Machiavellianism is a personality trait characterized by interpersonal manipulation and the use of unethical means to achieve certain self‐interested ends, whether useful or pleasant. This article adopts an Aristotelian understanding of philia, related to three goods on which human relationships rest: useful, pleasant, and honest. We propose that Machiavellianism, a self‐interested, pragmatic personality orientation, (...) might explicate the relationship between peers’ unethical behavior and ethical intention. The results of a structural equation model applied to a sample of 436 banking employees in Spain reveals that Machiavellianism partially mediates the relationship between peers’ unethical behavior and employees’ ethical intention. We also find that with a greater level of peers’ unethical behavior, the negative effect of Machiavellianism on ethical intention increases, and that when peers’ unethical behavior is nonexistent, the negative effect of Machiavellianism on ethical intention disappears. These findings advance current literature by revealing that unethical peers can indirectly influence ethical intention, through shaping Machiavellianism. Our study is also the first to show that pairing high Machiavellians with ethical peers can help to cancel out the negative influence of Machiavellianism on ethical intention. (shrink)

This study investigates the relations among Machiavellianism, the stakeholder orientation, and Italian managers' support for corporate social and environmental reporting (SER). These relationships have not previously been investigated among a sample of experienced managers but have important implications. As anticipated, Machiavellianism had a strong negative association with the support for SER. Machiavellianism was also negatively related to the stakeholder orientation, which in turn was positively correlated with the support for SER. Support for the stakeholder orientation partially mediated the association between (...) Machiavellianism and SER. The findings advance our understanding of the motivations for sustainability reporting by documenting that managers' fundamental personality traits and economic ideologies are closely associated and are important determinants of normative support for social and environmental disclosures. We further suggest that the results support the case for mandated compliance‐with‐standard sustainability reports coupled with a requirement that such reports be independently audited. (shrink)