A systematic comparison of three sadism measures and their ability to explain workplace mistreatment over and above the dark triad

•Sadism was positively associated with interpersonal deviance and incivility.•Sadism was positively associated with cyberbullying.•Sadism predicted mistreatment and disciplinary actions beyond the dark triad.•The three sadism measures were interchangeable in predicting outcomes.•The SSIS was the only scale that demonstrated measurement invariance across sexes. The present study investigated a potential antecedent of workplace mistreatment, sadism, which represents the dispositional tendency to engage in cruel, demeaning, or harmful behavior for dominance or pleasure. Time-lagged data from 379 Amazon Mechanical Turk workers showed that sadism positively predicted interpersonal deviance, instigated incivility, and cyberbullying frequency above and beyond the dark triad. Moreover, relative weight analyses consistently identified sadism as the most important predictor of workplace mistreatment compared to other dark triad predictors. This study also sought to identify possible differences among three popular sadism scales. The three scales were interchangeable in terms of predicting the outcomes. Confirmatory factor analyses and differential item functioning analyses both revealed, however, that only the SSIS was invariant across sex groups.