Are you working for a corporate psychopath?

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/psychopaths-ceos-study-statistics-one-in-five-psychopathic-traits-a7251251.html

Details of a study by Nathan Brooks of Bond University have hit the news today, revealing that as many as 1 in 5 executives could be classified as corporate psychopaths. However, we shouldn’t all be running screaming from our offices for fear of being murdered by our psychopathic boss. The traits of psychopathy don’t automatically make someone a mass murderer, violent or even immoral (don’t be duped by the media images from American Psycho). And not all executives are bad; if 21% in this study have high levels of psychopathy then the other 79% don’t. A study in America by Paul Babiak and colleagues found that average psychopathy scores were actually lower in the corporate samples than in community samples; so there are ‘good’ people in business too! Furthermore, Scott Lilienfeld suggests in his interview their tenure may be short lived. Indeed, my own research into psychopathic career paths suggests that there is no relationship between high psychopathy scores and achieving promotions or managerial status in UK organisations. So maybe we don’t need to be too worried as there are lots of non-psychopath executives and the psychopathic ones may not last long anyway? Well I think we should be worried; research into corporate psychopaths shows that they can do a tremendous amount of damage to employees, corporate reputation and business performance whilst employed and they can do so quickly. Mr Brook’s suggestion that organisations screen for personality traits when hiring staff is clearly a sensible one and one that organisations should look closely at, however nervous they may feel about the concept. Businesses need to appreciate that if they look for people who are tough, ruthless and extremely ambitious to fill their top spots, they may get more corporate psychopaths than they bargained for.

Contact me h.andrews@worc.ac.uk to talk about psychopaths