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

One in four people who answered a recent HRD LinkedIn poll believe difficult personality traits are more common in HR than in other professions. Of those who voted, 26 per cent said HR has more than most, 36 per cent said about the same as others, 21 per cent said less because “it’s a people job”, and 18 per cent said they had never thought about it.

The question cuts to the core of the function. HR teams investigate bullying, manage misconduct and are expected to screen out toxic leaders. Yet how common traits such as low empathy and a tendency to manipulate are across the HR profession remains largely unexplored.

One respondent to the poll argued that HR professionals should ideally be impartial, objective and emotionally intelligent – particularly when they are the ones investigating misconduct and managing workplace conflict.

Patrick Dunlop, a professor at the Curtin University Future of Work Institute and a registered organisational psychologist, says the evidence points away from any single profession and towards one personality trait in particular.

“But I wouldn’t imagine HR is  the kind of role thatwould just attract people like this,” Dunlop told HRD.

Difficult personalities in HR: what the data shows

The best-known ranking of personality by profession comes from University of Oxford psychologist Kevin Dutton. His Great British Psychopath Survey, an online survey reported in his 2012 book The Wisdom of Psychopaths, placed CEOs first among professions attracting psychopathic traits, followed by lawyers and media professionals. As HRD reported in its coverage of which jobs are most likely to attract psychopaths, HR appeared in neither Dutton’s top 10 nor his bottom 10.

Peer-reviewed data offers a more detailed picture of the profession. A 2025 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology by Kätlin Anni, Uku Vainik and René Mõttus of the University of Tartu in Estonia mapped the personalities of 68,540 adults across 263 occupations.

The study measured the Big Five – the most widely used personality framework, covering extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience and neuroticism. Human resource managers ranked 10th lowest of all 263 occupations for neuroticism and seventh highest for extraversion.

HR managers also recorded the highest average score of any occupation on the statement “Have a natural talent for influencing people”, and the third highest on adapting easily to new situations.

“I was a bit surprised that HR would feature in the top 10 or the bottom 10 of any of the traits,” Dunlop said. “I thought that would be in the middle.”

The authors caution that occupation explained only 2 to 7 per cent of the variation in Big Five traits. In other words, individuals within any job vary far more than the averages suggest.

Dunlop believes the nature of HR work may itself deter some of the most problematic personalities. “A lot of HR is just making sure you comply with the law. And so people who are low in honesty and humility tend to be less interested in that.”

Why honesty-humility matters more than job title

The Big Five does not measure the trait Dunlop considers most relevant to toxic behaviour. That trait sits in the HEXACO model, developed in the early 2000s, which adds a sixth dimension called honesty-humility to the Big Five.

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.

Disliked people at work were overwhelmingly described as dishonest (low honesty-humility), disagreeable (low agreeableness) and careless (low conscientiousness). The researchers call these the Three Nonnormative Traits, a model formerly known as the “Three Nightmare Traits”. They dropped the earlier name because they considered it demeaning to the people it described.

The findings also challenged an assumption about who people dislike most. Colleagues made up 52 per cent of disliked work contacts, compared with 38 per cent for bosses.

“Actually, when we asked people about people they dislike, I thought the boss would be the most common, but it was actually a colleague,” Dunlop said.

For HR, the sharper question is what happens when the person running a misconduct process carries these traits. Dunlop believes the risk lies less in the investigation itself and more in the politics around it.

“So if they’re dealing with a bullying complaint between 2 people, they don’t really have any skin in the game at all,” he said. “Probably wouldn’t see any reason to do anything untoward, but they themselves are probably comfortable being a bully or playing political games with others that might be vying for resources in the organisation.”

That distinction matters for employers reviewing how HR should respond after a bullying claim. Impartiality in a single case does not guarantee a people leader is behaving well elsewhere in the organisation.

Dunlop also warns against assuming every unpopular HR decision reflects a flawed personality. Many HR managers are under pressure from executives, budgets or economic conditions. “But actually, they’re just the meat in the sandwich.”

How to spot the warning signs in leaders

Personality questionnaires remain the most reliable tool, Dunlop says, and employers could use them far more widely than they do.

“The best, the least worst measure of personality is the questionnaire,” he said. “I would say to businesses, hey, we’ve developed standardised ways to assess each other’s personalities and aptitudes and skills, why do we only use them in selection or recruitment.”

Without a questionnaire, behaviour offers clues. The clearest, in Dunlop’s view, is how someone treats people who hold no power over them.

“One good example is people that are good at managing up but terrible at managing down. That’s a signal.”

Other signals he identifies include overt displays of wealth, a constant focus on “I” rather than “we”, and a belief that business is a dog-eat-dog contest. People low on honesty-humility also tend to assume others share their outlook, which can make them distrustful of everyone around them.

No single behaviour is proof, however. “They’re just single behaviours. Like someone might just like Porsches. That’s totally fine,” Dunlop said.

Where the pattern is clear, the advice from the researchers who developed the HEXACO model is blunt, he says: limit that person’s power and keep your distance, because they are rarely interested in changing.

For HR leaders weighing the cost of leaving such behaviour unchecked, the stakes include minimising the risk of psychological injury at work for everyone exposed to it.