# Using a serious game for a brief assessment of dark personality in the workplace

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a game-based method to assess dark personality traits in the workplace, avoiding biases found in traditional questionnaires.

## Contribution

The study presents a new gamified assessment (VASSIP) with validated psychometric properties for measuring dark personality.

## Key findings

- The gamified VASSIP has a unidimensional structure with 5 items.
- It shows validity by correlating with traits like Honesty-Humility and counterproductive work behaviors.
- The assessment provides a situational approach to understanding dark personality in workplace contexts.

## Abstract

The assessment of dark personality using self-report questionnaires suffers limitations due to social desirability, bias, and response faking, particularly in organizational contexts. This research examines the psychometric properties of an extended version of VASSIP, a gamified assessment to briefly measure dark personality through an immersive situational judgment test (SJT).

A sample of 395 Spanish workers (47.4% female, Mjob experience = 10.4 years) participated in the study, completing questionnaires of the target variables and playing the gamified assessment.

The hard-gamified extension of VASSIP has a unidimensional factor structure with 5 items. Validity was supported by direct associations with Honesty-Humility, moral disengagement, task performance, and counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs).

Therefore, this measure appears to be valuable for briefly assessing dark personality, although its predictive capacity could be optimized. Its situational approach offers a more nuanced understanding of how individuals manifest dark personality in workplace scenarios.