When Psychopaths Go to Work

[Daniel E.]

The Stack: 'The Psychopath Test' by Jon Ronson
BusinessWeek.com
July 2011

...While studies suggest that about 1 percent of the general population qualifies as genuinely psychopathic, Hare believes that about 4 percent of people with substantial decision-making power can be classified as such, and their influence is outsized. Hare even tells Ronson he wishes he’d spent less time studying psychopaths in prison and more time studying those who work in the markets. “Serial killers ruin families,” Hare says. “Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.” Although Ronson leans heavily on Hare’s research, he explains that other psychologists feel the same way. “The higher you go up the ladder,” says Martha Stout, a former Harvard Medical School professor and author of The Sociopath Next Door, “the greater the number of sociopaths you’ll find there.” (Ronson uses the terms socio- and psychopath interchangeably.)

...As wardens have long known, Ronson explains, psychopaths are incurable. Their deformity is physical—a temporal lobe of their brains does not seem to transmit or respond to normal emotional cues, such as fear or a terrible product launch. It’s almost a relief to know there is a physical difference that allows so many CEOs to stare into a camera and say they won’t be cutting the dividend, right before they cut the dividend.

Psychopaths have other advantages, too. According to Ronson, they learn to mimic emotion to manipulate their victims. “Try to teach them empathy and they’ll cunningly use it,” he writes. To such monsters, therapy is grist and workplace harassment videos are little more than training tools. There is nothing to do, really, but lock them up, or put them in charge.

This makes perfect sense. Agonized intellectuals full of sympathy for the common man aren’t meant for the corner office. Such persons would be useless making repetitive decisions about whom to fire and whom to give raises and how much to spend on marketing to children. Human resources executives have known this for a long time, especially those who sat through management courses in business school. As they probably learned, psychologist and management guru David McClelland divided workers’ personalities into three categories: those who need power, those who need to achieve, and those who want to be liked. He developed his own test and found that those with a high need to achieve and a high need for affiliation—in other words, really great people—made excellent customer service reps. Those who thirst for power—and couldn’t care less about what people think of them—end up running things.

Perhaps those who never make it to the top may be reassured to know they weren’t born with a horrifying emotional deformity...

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From a 2005 article previously mentioned on Psychlinks:

Indeed, not every aberrant boss is necessarily a corporate psychopath. There's another personality that's often found in the executive suite: the narcissist. While many psychologists would call narcissism a disorder, this trait can be quite beneficial for top bosses, and it's certainly less pathological than psychopathy. Maccoby's book The Productive Narcissist: The Promise and Perils of Visionary Leadership (Broadway Books, 2003) portrays the narcissistic CEO as a grandiose egotist who is on a mission to help humanity in the abstract even though he's often insensitive to the real people around him. Maccoby counts Apple's Steve Jobs, General Electric's Jack Welch, Intel's Andy Grove, Microsoft's Bill Gates, and Southwest Airlines' Herb Kelleher as "productive narcissists," or PNs.

Narcissists are visionaries who attract hordes of followers, which can make them excel as innovators, but they're poor listeners and they can be awfully touchy about criticism. "These people don't have much empathy," Maccoby says. "When Bill Gates tells someone, 'That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard,' or Steve Jobs calls someone a bozo, they're not concerned about people's feelings. They see other people as a means toward their ends. But they do have a sense of changing the world -- in their eyes, improving the world. They build their own view of what the world should be and get others recruited to their vision. Psychopaths, in contrast, are only interested in self."

Maccoby concedes that productive narcissists can become "drunk with power" and turn destructive. The trick, he thinks, is to pair a productive narcissist with a "productive obsessive," or conscientious, control-minded manager. Think of Grove when he was matched with chief operating officer Craig Barrett, Gates with president Steve Ballmer, Kelleher with COO Colleen Barrett, and Oracle's Larry Ellison with COO Ray Lane and CFO Jeff Henley. In his remarkably successful second tour of duty at Apple, Jobs has been balanced by steady, competent behind-the-scenes players such as Timothy Cook, his executive vice president for sales and operations.

But our culture's embrace of narcissism as the hallmark of admired business leaders is dangerous, Babiak maintains, since "individuals who are really psychopaths are often mistaken for narcissists and chosen by the organization for leadership positions." How does he distinguish the difference between the two types? "In the case of a narcissist, everything is me, me, me," Babiak explains. "With a psychopath, it's 'Is it thrilling, is it a game I can win, and does it hurt others?' My belief is a psychopath enjoys hurting others."

Intriguingly, Babiak believes that it's extremely unlikely for an entrepreneurial founder-CEO to be a corporate psychopath because the company is an extension of his own ego -- something he promotes rather than plunders. "The psychopath has no allegiance to the company at all, just to self," Babiak says. "A psychopath is playing a short-term parasitic game." That was the profile of Fastow and Dunlap -- guys out to profit for themselves without any concern for the companies and lives they were wrecking. In contrast, Jobs and Ellison want their own companies to thrive forever -- indeed, to dominate their industries and take over other fields as well. "An entrepreneurial founder-CEO might have a narcissistic tendency that looks like psychopathy," Babiak says. "But they have a vested interest: Their identity is wrapped up with the company's existence. They're loyal to the company." So these types are ruthless not only for themselves but also for their companies, their extensions of self.

The issue is whether we will continue to elevate, celebrate, and reward so many executives who, however charismatic, remain indifferent to hurting other people. Babiak says that while the first line of defense against psychopaths in the workplace is screening job candidates, the second line is a "culture of openness and trust, especially when the company is undergoing intense, chaotic change."

Europe is far ahead of the United States in trying to deal with psychological abuse and manipulation at work. The "antibullying" movement in Europe has produced new laws in France and Sweden. Harvard's Stout suggests that the relentlessly individualistic culture of the United States contributes a lot to our problems. She points out that psychopathy has a dramatically lower incidence in certain Asian cultures, where the heritage has emphasized community bonds rather than glorified self-interest. "If we continue to go this way in our Western culture," she says, "evolutionarily speaking, it doesn't end well."

The good news is that we can do something about corporate psychopaths. Scientific consensus says that only about 50% of personality is influenced by genetics, so psychopaths are molded by our culture just as much as they are born among us. But unless American business makes a dramatic shift, we'll get more Enrons -- and deserve them.

Is Your Boss a Psychopath?