Psychopathy in the workplace


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. 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. Ethical standards of entire organisations can be badly damaged if a corporate psychopath is in charge. A 2017 UK study found that companies with leaders who show "psychopathic characteristics" destroy shareholder value, tending to have poor future returns on equity.
Academics refer to psychopathic individuals in organizational settings as workplace psychopaths. Criminal psychologist Robert D. Hare coined the term "snakes in suits" as a synonym for workplace psychopaths.

General

identifies psychopathy as one of the dark triadic personality traits in the workplace, the others being narcissism and Machiavellianism.
Workplace psychopaths are often charming to staff above their level in the workplace hierarchy but abusive to staff below their level. They maintain multiple personas throughout the office, presenting each colleague with a different version of themselves.
Hare considers newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell to have been a strong candidate as a corporate psychopath.

Incidence

Hare reports that about 1 percent of the general population meets the clinical criteria for psychopathy. 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.

The organizational psychopath

Psychopaths aim to reach the very highest levels of their organizations, allowing them to control the greatest number of people.
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.
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.

Careers with highest proportion of psychopaths

According to Kevin Dutton, the ten careers with the highest proportion of those who score high on psychopathic traits are:
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:
  • Public humiliation of others
  • Malicious spreading of lies
  • Remorseless, devoid of guilt
  • Frequently lie to push one's own point
  • Produce exaggerated bodily expressions as a means of gaining attention
  • Rapidly shift between emotions – used to manipulate people or cause high anxiety
  • Intentionally isolate persons from organizational resources
  • Quick to blame others for mistakes or for incomplete work even though they are guilty
  • Encourage co-workers to torment, alienate, harass, and/or humiliate other peers
  • Take credit for others' accomplishments
  • Steal and/or sabotages other persons' work
  • Refuse to take responsibility for misjudgements and/or errors
  • Respond inappropriately to stimuli, such as with a high-pitched and forced laugh
  • Threaten any perceived enemy with discipline and/or job loss in order to taint employee file
  • Set unrealistic and unachievable job expectations to set employees up for failure
  • Refuse or are reluctant to attend meetings with more than one person
  • Refuse to provide adequate training and/or instructions to singled-out victim
  • Invade personal privacy of others
  • Have multiple sexual encounters with other employees
  • Develop new ideas without real follow-through
  • Very self-centered and extremely egotistical
  • Often "borrow" money and/or other material objects without any intentions of giving it back
  • Will do whatever it takes to close the deal

    Attainment of success

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:
  1. Entry – psychopaths may use highly developed social skills and charm to obtain employment into an organization. At this stage it could be difficult to spot anything indicative of psychopathic behaviour, and as a new employee, the psychopath might be perceived by people to be helpful and even benevolent.
  2. Assessment – psychopaths categorize people according to personal usefulness, and people could be recognized as either a pawn or a patron.
  3. Manipulation – psychopaths try to create a scenario of “psychopathic fiction” where positive information about themselves and negative disinformation or gossip about others, where people's role as a part of a network of pawns or patrons could be utilized and could be groomed into accepting the psychopath's agenda.
  4. Confrontation – the psychopath can use techniques of character assassination to maintain their agenda, and people will be either discarded as a pawn or used as a patron.
  5. Ascension – the role of the subject as a patron in the psychopath's quest for power will be discarded, and the psychopath will take for himself/herself a position of power and prestige from anyone who once supported them.

    Job seeking and hiring

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. However, in one case at least, an advert explicitly asked for a sales executive with psychopathic tendencies. The advert title read "Psychopathic New Business Media Sales Executive Superstar! £50k – £110k".
Corporate psychopaths are readily recruited into organizations because they make a distinctly positive impression at interviews. They appear to be alert, friendly and easy to get along with and talk to. 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. Their superficial charm may be misinterpreted by interviewers as charisma and yet obvious to skeptics and high performers.
Those who score high on psychopathic traits are more likely to lie in interviews. For instance, psychopaths may create fictitious work experiences or resumes and skeptical high performers can easily discern such fiction. They may also fabricate credentials such as diplomas, certifications, or awards and due diligence and skeptics and high performers easily discern such fabrications. 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.

Promotion of psychopathic individuals

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. They are also helped by their manipulative and bullying skills. They create confusion around them using instrumental bullying to promote their own agenda.
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.

Consequences of psychopathic behavior

Boddy identifies the following bad consequences of workplace psychopathy :
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.
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.