Can taking a systems perspective help to navigate working with Dark Triad bosses, co-workers and subordinates?

Working with a psychopathic, narcissistic or Machiavellian boss, co-worker or subordinate can be one of the biggest challenges you can face in the workplace. Individuals with high levels of these traits are likely to ignore the needs of the organisation and those they work with in favour of benefitting themselves. They often flout organisational rules and norms (and even laws) and can be relatively impervious to attempts to change their behaviour.

So if you can’t easily manage or change them, what can you do? One thing to consider is taking a systemic perspective of the situation, rather than focusing on the individual. A systemic perspective is a way of understanding situations, problems, or phenomena by viewing them as part of a larger, interconnected system rather than in isolation. It emphasizes relationships, patterns, and interactions between parts of the whole, recognizing that changes in one area can affect the entire system.

A systemic perspective can be very useful when thinking about employees who display Dark Triad traits. Instead of only focusing on the individual’s behaviour in isolation, the systemic lens allows us to consider how the wider system may be contributing to the behaviour of the individual.

For example, how does the organisation’s culture, structure, and leadership style create space for Dark Triad behaviours to thrive? In the wake of the 2007 financial crisis, I worked with several institutions in the financial sector to consider this very question. One thing that emerged was that the use of financial rewards that focused on short-term gains with little consideration of risk level was a factor which likely encouraged individuals with lower levels of empathy and higher levels of risk tolerance (as we see in the Dark Triad) to gamble with people’s money. It also allowed Dark Triad employees to blend in with the majority of employees, as everyone was incentivised to make high-risk, high-reward investments if they wanted a big bonus.

We can also consider what factors in the system amplify or restrain Dark Triad traits. A narcissistic employee may escalate conflicts in teams with weak communication norms, but not in teams with strong boundaries, for example. Psychopathic individuals may be able to manipulate lots of different people in organisations where communication is mainly on a one-to-one basis with little group interaction.

The systemic perspective also allows us to consider how the presence of such an employee affects the broader system? Ripple effects like lowered morale, turnover, or toxic subcultures can all occur when Dark Triad employees are present.

By taking a systemic perspective, we can then identify what systemic interventions can be made. These might include, revising incentive systems, strengthening accountability structures, and training leaders to recognize and contain destructive patterns. The systems perspective encourages us to consider not only how any changes made will impact on Dark Triad employees, but also how it will affect the organisation more broadly, the aim being to introduce interventions that benefit the organisation generally as well as curtailing the impact of Dark Triad employees.

In short, a systemic perspective moves the focus from “How do we fix this one difficult person?” to “How do we adjust the organizational system so their influence is minimized and healthier patterns are reinforced?” Given what we know about the resistance of Dark Traits to therapeutic intervention in clinical and forensic settings, this approach seems far more likely to yield positive results than attempts to manage and change the individual.