While psychopaths typically represent a very small percentage of workplace staff, the presence of psychopathy in the workplace, especially within senior management, can do enormous damage. [1] Indeed, psychopaths are usually most present at higher levels of corporate structure, and their actions often cause a ripple effect throughout an organization, setting the tone for an entire corporate culture. Examples of detrimental effects include increased bullying, conflict, stress, staff turnover, absenteeism, and reduction in both productivity and social responsibility. [2] Ethical standards of entire organisations can be badly damaged if a corporate psychopath is in charge. [3] A 2017 UK study found that companies with leaders who show "psychopathic characteristics" destroy shareholder value, tending to have poor future returns on equity. [4]
Academics refer to psychopaths in the workplace individually variously as workplace psychopaths or successful psychopaths, depending on the context. [5] Criminal psychologist Robert D. Hare coined the term "snakes in suits" as a synonym for workplace psychopaths. [6]
Oliver James identifies psychopathy as one of the dark triadic personality traits in the workplace, the others being narcissism and Machiavellianism. [7]
Workplace psychopaths are often charming to staff above their level in the workplace hierarchy but abusive to staff below their level. [8] They maintain multiple personas throughout the office, presenting each colleague with a different version of themselves. [9]
Hare considers newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell to have been a strong candidate as a corporate psychopath. [10]
Hare reports that about 1 percent of the general population meets the clinical criteria for psychopathy. [11] Hare further claims that the prevalence of psychopaths is higher in the business world than in the general population. Figures of around 3–4 percent have been cited for more senior positions in business. [6] A 2011 study of Australian white-collar managers found that 5.76 percent could be classed as psychopathic and another 10.42 percent dysfunctional with psychopathic characteristics. [12] [13] [ better source needed ]
Organizational psychopaths crave a god-like feeling of power and control over other people. They prefer to work at the very highest levels of their organizations, allowing them to control the greatest number of people. Psychopaths who are political leaders, managers, and CEOs fall into this category. [5]
Organizational psychopaths generally appear to be intelligent, sincere, powerful, charming, witty, and entertaining communicators. They quickly assess what people want to hear and then create stories that fit those expectations. They will con people into doing their work for them, take credit for other people's work and even assign their work to junior staff members. They have low patience when dealing with others, display shallow emotions, are unpredictable, undependable and fail to take responsibility if something goes wrong that is their fault. [5]
According to a study from the University of Notre Dame published in the Journal of Business Ethics, psychopaths have a natural advantage in workplaces overrun by abusive supervision, and are more likely to thrive under abusive bosses, being more resistant to stress, including interpersonal abuse, and having less of a need for positive relationships than others. [14] [15] [16]
According to Kevin Dutton, the ten careers with the highest proportion of psychopaths are: [17]
Workplace psychopaths may show a high number of the following behavior patterns. The individual behaviors are not exclusive to the workplace psychopath, though the higher the number of patterns exhibited, the more likely they conform to the psychopath profile: [18]
The authors of the book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work describe a five-phase model of how a typical workplace psychopath tries to climb and maintain power: [6]
Leading commentators on psychopathy have said that companies inadvertently attract employees who are psychopaths because of the wording of their job advertisements and their desire to engage people who are prepared to do whatever it takes to be successful in business. [5] [6] However, in one case at least, an advert explicitly asked for a sales executive with psychopathic tendencies. [19] The advert title read "Psychopathic New Business Media Sales Executive Superstar! £50k – £110k". [20]
Corporate psychopaths are readily recruited into organizations because they make a distinctly positive impression at interviews. [21] They appear to be alert, friendly and easy to get along with and talk to. [22] They look like they are of good ability and seem emotionally well adjusted and reasonable. These traits make them attractive to those in charge of hiring staff within organizations. Unlike narcissists, psychopaths are better able to create long-lasting favorable first impressions, though people may still eventually see through their facades. [23] Psychopaths' undesirable personality traits may be easily misperceived by even skilled interviewers. Skilled interviewers can easily discern psychopathic qualities by including extremely skeptical high performing loyal employees throughout the entire interview of each interview while maintaining emotional balance. For instance, skilled interviewers can understand that sometimes irresponsibility may be misconstrued by employers as risk-taking or entrepreneurial spirit and are encouraged to deeply query and understand if being employed is specific to building responsibility and a career or its the other. Their thrill-seeking tendencies may be conveyed as high energy and enthusiasm for the job or work and skilled interviewers must strive to unravel the misconstrued to know and understand specific to the interviewees intentions. Their superficial charm may be misinterpreted by interviewers as charisma and yet obvious to skeptics and high performers. [23]
Those who score high on psychopathic traits are more likely to lie in interviews. [24] For instance, psychopaths may create fictitious work experiences or resumes and skeptical high performers can easily discern such fiction. [23] They may also fabricate credentials such as diplomas, certifications, or awards and due diligence and skeptics and high performers easily discern such fabrications. [23] Thus, in addition to seeming competent and likable in interviews, psychopaths are also more likely to outright make-up information during interviews than non-psychopaths and thus the necessity of including extremely skeptical high performing loyal employees throughout the entire interview and review of each interview.
Corporate psychopaths within organizations may be singled out for rapid promotion because of their polish, charm, and cool decisiveness and yet can also be singled out for rapid firing and removal. [25] They are also helped by their manipulative and bullying skills. [22] They create confusion around them (divide and rule, etc.) using instrumental bullying to promote their own agenda. [26]
Psychopaths are able to maintain calm when others are reacting to normal stress and dangerous situations. Psychopaths are well versed in impression management and ingratiation, both skills that can be used to impress people in positions of power and are also obvious indications of psychopathic traits easily discerned. [27]
Boddy identifies the following bad consequences of workplace psychopathy (with additional cites in some cases): [2]
Boddy suggests that because of abusive supervision by corporate psychopaths, large amounts of anti-company feeling will be generated among the employees of the organisations that corporate psychopaths work in. This should result in high levels of counterproductive behaviour as employees give vent to their anger with the corporation, which they perceive to be acting through its corporate psychopathic managers in a way that is eminently unfair to them. [2]
According to a 2017 UK study, a high ranking corporate psychopath could trigger lower ranked staff to become workplace bullies as a manifestation of counterproductive work behavior. [33]
Boddy makes the case that corporate psychopaths were instrumental in causing the 2007–08 global financial crisis. [25] He claims that the same corporate psychopaths who probably caused the crisis by greed and avarice are now advising government on how to get out of the crisis. [2]
Psychologist Oliver James has described the credit crunch as a "mass outbreak of corporate psychopathy which resulted in something that very nearly crashed the whole world economy". [34]
For example, during this financial crisis, the behaviour of some key people at the top of the world's largest banks came under scrutiny. At the time of its collapse in 2008 the Royal Bank of Scotland was the world's fifth largest bank by market capitalisation. CEO Fred "the Shred" Goodwin was known for taking excessive risks and showing little concern for his mismanagement, which led to the bank's collapse. Goodwin's demeanour toward colleagues was unpredictable and he is said to have lived a luxury lifestyle while fostering a culture of fear. [35]
Renowned psychotherapist Professor Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries singled out Goodwin and former Barclays CEO Bob Diamond as exhibiting psychopathic behaviours in his working paper on the SOB, "seductive operational bully – or psychopath lite". [36]
From an organizational perspective, organizations can insulate themselves from the organizational psychopath by taking the following steps when recruiting: [18]
The following tests could be used to screen psychopaths:
There have been anecdotal reports that at least one UK bank was using a psychopathy measure to actively recruit psychopaths. [40] [41]
Research findings based on the PM-MRV may have little relevance to medical psychopathy. [42]
Narcissism, lack of self-regulation, lack of remorse, and lack of conscience have been identified as traits displayed by bullies. These traits are shared with psychopaths, indicating that there is some theoretical cross-over between bullies and psychopaths. [29] Bullying is used by corporate psychopaths as a tactic to humiliate subordinates. [5] Bullying is also used as a tactic to scare, confuse and disorient those who may be a threat to the activities of the corporate psychopath. [5] Using meta data analysis on hundreds of UK research papers, Boddy concluded that 36% of bullying incidents were caused by the presence of corporate psychopaths. According to Boddy, there are two types of bullying: [2]
A corporate psychopath uses instrumental bullying to further his goals of promotion and power as the result of causing confusion and divide and rule.
People with high scores on a psychopathy rating scale are more likely to engage in bullying, crime, and drug use than other people. [28] Hare and Babiak noted that about 29 per cent of corporate psychopaths are also bullies. [6] Other research has also shown that people with high scores on a psychopathy rating scale were more likely to engage in bullying, again indicating that psychopaths tend to be bullies in the workplace. [28]
A workplace bully or abuser will often have issues with social functioning. These types of people often have psychopathic traits that are difficult to identify in the hiring and promotion process. These individuals often lack anger management skills and have a distorted sense of reality. Consequently, when confronted with the accusation of abuse, the abuser is not aware that any harm was done. [43] Team ethics and values prevent, detect, and correct bullying and mobbing in the workplace.
Industrial and organizational psychology "focuses the lens of psychological science on a key aspect of human life, namely, their work lives. In general, the goals of I-O psychology are to better understand and optimize the effectiveness, health, and well-being of both individuals and organizations." It is an applied discipline within psychology and is an international profession. I-O psychology is also known as occupational psychology in the United Kingdom, organisational psychology in Australia and New Zealand, and work and organizational (WO) psychology throughout Europe and Brazil. Industrial, work, and organizational (IWO) psychology is the broader, more global term for the science and profession.
A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a chief executive or managing director, is the top-ranking corporate executive charged with the management of an organization, usually a company or a nonprofit organization.
Systemic bias is the inherent tendency of a process to support particular outcomes. The term generally refers to human systems such as institutions. Systemic bias is related to and overlaps conceptually with institutional bias and structural bias, and the terms are often used interchangeably.
The Corporation is a 2003 Canadian documentary film written by University of British Columbia law professor Joel Bakan and filmmaker Harold Crooks, and directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. The documentary examines the modern corporation. Bakan wrote the book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power during the filming of the documentary.
Organizational behavior or organisational behaviour is the "study of human behavior in organizational settings, the interface between human behavior and the organization, and the organization itself". Organizational behavioral research can be categorized in at least three ways:
Robert D. Hare is a Canadian forensic psychologist, known for his research in the field of criminal psychology. He is a professor emeritus of the University of British Columbia where he specializes in psychopathology and psychophysiology.
Workplace bullying is a persistent pattern of mistreatment from others in the workplace that causes either physical or emotional harm. It includes verbal, nonverbal, psychological, and physical abuse, as well as humiliation. This type of workplace aggression is particularly difficult because, unlike typical school bullies, workplace bullies often operate within the established rules and policies of both their organization and society. In most cases, workplace bullying is reported as being carried out by someone who is in a position of authority over the victim. However, bullies can also be peers or subordinates. When subordinates participate in bullying, this is referred to as ‘upwards bullying.’ The least visible form of workplace bullying involves upwards bullying where bullying tactics are manipulated and applied against a superior, often for strategically motivated outcomes.
A toxic leader is a person who abuses the leader–follower relationship by leaving the group or organization in a worse condition than it was in originally. Toxic leaders therefore create an environment that may be detrimental to employees, thus lowering overall morale in the organization.
Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work is a 2006 non-fiction book by industrial psychologist Paul Babiak and criminal psychologist Robert D. Hare. The book describes how a workplace psychopath can take power in a business using manipulation.
Psychopathy, or psychopathic personality, is a personality construct characterized by impaired empathy and remorse, in combination with traits of boldness, disinhibition, and egocentrism. These traits are often masked by superficial charm and immunity to stress, which create an outward appearance of apparent normalcy.
A workplace is a location where someone works, for their employer or themselves, a place of employment. Such a place can range from a home office to a large office building or factory. For industrialized societies, the workplace is one of the most important social spaces other than the home, constituting "a central concept for several entities: the worker and [their] family, the employing organization, the customers of the organization, and the society as a whole". The development of new communication technologies has led to the development of the virtual workplace and remote work.
The Psychopathy Checklist or Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised, now the Psychopathy Checklist—revised (PCL-R), is a psychological assessment tool that is commonly used to assess the presence and extent of psychopathy in individuals—most often those institutionalized in the criminal justice system—and to differentiate those high in this trait from those with antisocial personality disorder, a related diagnosable disorder. It is a 20-item inventory of perceived personality traits and recorded behaviors, intended to be completed on the basis of a semi-structured interview along with a review of "collateral information" such as official records. The psychopath tends to display a constellation or combination of high narcissistic, borderline, and antisocial personality disorder traits, which includes superficial charm, charisma/attractiveness, sexual seductiveness and promiscuity, affective instability, suicidality, lack of empathy, feelings of emptiness, self-harm, and splitting. In addition, sadistic and paranoid traits are usually also present.
The dark triad is a psychological theory of personality, first published by Delroy L. Paulhus and Kevin M. Williams in 2002, that describes three notably offensive, but non-pathological personality types: Machiavellianism, sub-clinical narcissism, and sub-clinical psychopathy. Each of these personality types is called dark because each is considered to contain malevolent qualities.
Job performance assesses whether a person performs a job well. Job performance, studied academically as part of industrial and organizational psychology, also forms a part of human resources management. Performance is an important criterion for organizational outcomes and success. John P. Campbell describes job performance as an individual-level variable, or something a single person does. This differentiates it from more encompassing constructs such as organizational performance or national performance, which are higher-level variables.
Counterproductive work behavior (CWB) is employee's behavior that goes against the legitimate interests of an organization. This behavior can harm the organization, other people within it, and other people and organizations outside it, including employers, other employees, suppliers, clients, patients and citizens. It has been proposed that a person-by-environment interaction (the relationship between a person's psychological and physical capacities and the demands placed on those capacities by the person's social and physical environment.) can be utilized to explain a variety of counterproductive behaviors. For instance, an employee who is high on trait anger is more likely to respond to a stressful incident at work with CWB.
Workplace incivility has been defined as low-intensity deviant behavior with ambiguous intent to harm the target. Uncivil behaviors are characteristically rude and discourteous, displaying a lack of regard for others. The authors hypothesize there is an "incivility spiral" in the workplace made worse by "asymmetric global interaction". Incivility is distinct from aggression. The reduction of workplace incivility is an area for industrial and organizational psychology research.
Abusive supervision is most commonly studied in the context of the workplace, although it can arise in other areas such as in the household and at school. Abusive supervision has been investigated as major cause of negative outcomes in managing employees. Studies have been conducted to investigate the link between abusive supervision and different workplace events.
Narcissism in the workplace involves the impact of narcissistic employees and managers in workplace settings.
Machiavellianism in the workplace is a concept studied by many organizational psychologists. Conceptualized originally by Richard Christie and Florence Geis, Machiavellianism in psychology refers to a personality trait construct based on a cold, callous and exploitative orientation. It has been adapted and applied to the context of the workplace and organizations by psychology academics. Oliver James wrote on the effects of Machiavellianism and other dark triad personality traits in the workplace, the others being narcissism and psychopathy.
In the field of personality psychology, Machiavellianism is the name of a personality trait construct characterized by interpersonal manipulation, indifference to morality, lack of empathy, and a calculated focus on self-interest. Psychologists Richard Christie and Florence L. Geis created the construct and named it after Niccolò Machiavelli, as they used truncated and edited statements similar to his writing style to study variations in human behaviors. The construct's relation to the thinker himself is exclusively nominal. Their Mach IV test, a 20-question, Likert-scale personality survey, became the standard self-assessment tool and scale of the Machiavellianism construct. Those who score high on the scale are more likely to have a high level of manipulativeness, deceitfulness and a cynical, unemotional temperament.
why was Fred Goodwin, the CEO of Royal Bank of Scotland, able to get away with the things he did?... What's clear is that many of these SOB 'masters of the universe' have been busily destroying the universe for personal gain
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