The roles of latent perfectionism classes in academicians’ tendencies toward workaholism, useless superiority effort and narcissism

Abstract

Although previous research has identified that perfectionism is associated with both narcissism and workaholism, research into the specific roles of potential perfectionism classes in these personality dynamics is currently unavailable. Furthermore, no study has investigated if the “useless superiority effort” dimension of inferiority feelings, which indicates an increased need for superiority over others potentially to overcome self-perceived inferiorities, is related to other important personality dynamics. This study was therefore conducted to identify if potential perfectionism classes that exist among academicians (N = 317) can simultaneously explain significant differences in their tendencies toward workaholism, narcissism, and useless superiority effort, after controlling for potential social desirability effect. A latent class analysis of two dimensions of perfectionism (discrepancy and high standards) revealed four distinct classes of academicians; non-perfectionists (NONPs; 20%), maladaptive perfectionists (MPs; 17%), normal perfectionists (NPs; 44%) and adaptive perfectionists (APs; 19%). Further analysis (MANCOVA) showed that while MPs have the highest tendencies toward workaholism and useless superiority effort, NONPs have the lowest tendencies toward these. Moreover, APs reported significantly lower useless superiority than NPs, despite scoring similarly on both narcissism and workaholism. Additionally, based on workaholism being related to narcissism, high standards and discrepancy dimensions of perfectionism, as well as useless superiority effort, while weekly work hours are not, it can be suggested that workaholism is qualitatively different from working long hours.