The dark side of management decisions: organisational psychopaths

Abstract

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -This paper aims to look at some of the implications of organisational psychopaths for organisations and corporations. Design/methodology/approach -This paper defines organisational psychopaths as being those psychopaths who exist at an incidence of about 1 percent of the general population and who work in organisations. The paper describes how these organisational psychopaths are able to present themselves as desirable employees and are easily able to obtain positions in organisations. Without the inhibiting effect of a conscience they are then able to ruthlessly charm, lie, cajole and manipulate their way up an organisational hierarchy in pursuit of their main aims of power, wealth and status and at the expense of anyone who gets in their way. Findings -The paper suggests that, just as criminal psychopaths are responsible for a greater share of crimes than their numbers would suggest, so too organisational psychopaths may be responsible for more than their fair share of organisational misbehaviour including accounting fraud, stock manipulation, unnecessarily high job losses and corporately induced environmental damage. Originality/value -The paper suggests that having organisational psychopaths running corporations that are themselves, at best, amoral is a recipe for negative consequences.

Taxonomia do Dark Triad: Revelações da Rede Científica no Meio Organizacional

“…Neste sentido, estudos na área de negócios e contábil têm relacionado a personalidade com o comportamento dos indivíduos no meio empresarial, objetivando mensurar os reflexos nos relatórios financeiros (Amernic & Craig, 2010;Johnson, Kuhn Jr, Apostolou & Hassell, 2013;Olsen, Young, & Dworkis, 2013;Murphy, 2012), detectar atitudes aversivas dos líderes (Boddy, 2006) e a relação com o desempenho empresarial (Babiak, Neumann & Hare, 2010).…”

Extreme managers, extreme workplaces: Capitalism, organizations and corporate psychopaths

“…Others may have better cognitive levels of executive functioning, for example in the orbitalfrontal cortex of the brain, and may retain the ability to control their impulses enabling them to seek corporate rather than criminal careers (Mullins-Sweatt, Glover, Derefinko, Miller, & Widiger, 2010). Such psychopaths have come to be called Industrial Psychopaths, Executive Psychopaths, Organizational Psychopaths or Corporate Psychopaths to differentiate them from their more commonly known criminal peers (Babiak, 1995;Babiak & O'Toole, 2012;Boddy, 2006;Morse, 2004). The term Corporate Psychopaths has now been adopted as the usual term for such people (Babiak et al, 2012;Boddy, 2011d;Hare, 1999).…”

“…Corporate Psychopaths are reported to be excellent manipulators of other people, good at organizational politics and skilled at causing divisions among their colleagues in order to make them disunited and easier to control (Babiak et al, 2006;Boddy, 2006;Clarke, 2005).…”

“…Psychopaths are people with a constellation of behavioral traits that marks them as uniquely ruthless in their parasitic and care-free, predatory approach to life (Boddy, 2006;Connelly, Lilienfeld, & Schmeelk, 2006;Hare, 1994). Psychologists have not reached a conclusion as to the causes of psychopathy but do recognize that there are patterns of brain dysfunction associated with the syndrome with particular impairment in the orbital-frontal cortex being evident (Blair, 2008;Blair, 2001;Perez, 2012).…”

“…This research is important because there is still deemed to be a lack of research into the presence and prevalence of psychopathy within corporations and into what the implications of this presence may be and several calls for further research in this area have been made (Babiak, Neumann, & Hare, 2010;Boddy, 2006;Smith & Lilienfeld, 2013). Additionally, Corporate Psychopathy theory posits that changes in the speed of personnel turnover within corporations are making it easier rather than harder for psychopaths to thrive in business because there is not enough time for colleagues to recognize the destructive nature of their character traits (Boddy 2011a).…”