Hi all, I haven't read this book yet, but I found it referenced on the forum here, searched for it, and found that it didn't have its own section. It sounds like a pretty darn good book, so I'm curious if anyone has read it.
Corporate Psychopaths: Organizational Destroyers
An interview with the author Clive Boddy on OpEdNews shows that this guy has done a lot of really interesting research on the subject of psychopathy both historically (the diagnosis of Hitler and other Nazis as psychopaths by English and American psychiatrist) and some statistics on psychopathy in the modern world, how they relate to the bullying phenomenon, financial collapse, etc. I'd be interested in purchasing the book, but it's just a bit out of my price range right now.
The interview:
from _http://www.opednews.com/articles/Corporate-Psychopaths-Tra-by-Rob-Kall-130727-402.html
Corporate Psychopaths: Organizational Destroyers
Although they comprise only a small percentage of employees and senior managers, corporate psychopaths have a massive and significantly negative influence on organizational outcomes. Psychopaths who work within organizations cause increased levels of bullying and conflict, rises in organizational withdrawal behaviour, rises in organizational constraints, lower job satisfaction and lower levels of corporate social responsibility. Organizations and societies that want to survive and prosper will have to weed out corporate psychopaths , or closely monitor their activities.
Psychopaths are little understood outside of their criminal manifestation. However, as the recent global financial crisis has highlighted, the conscience-free behaviour of a small group of corporate managers can, if left unchecked, potentially bring down the entire western system of business. This book investigates who these people are, why they do what they do and what the consequences of their presence are in organizations.
An interview with the author Clive Boddy on OpEdNews shows that this guy has done a lot of really interesting research on the subject of psychopathy both historically (the diagnosis of Hitler and other Nazis as psychopaths by English and American psychiatrist) and some statistics on psychopathy in the modern world, how they relate to the bullying phenomenon, financial collapse, etc. I'd be interested in purchasing the book, but it's just a bit out of my price range right now.
The interview:
from _http://www.opednews.com/articles/Corporate-Psychopaths-Tra-by-Rob-Kall-130727-402.html
Clive Boddy, Author, Corporate Psychopaths
Rob Kall : My guest tonight is Clive Boddy, he's the author of Corporate Psychopaths: Organizational Destroyers. Now you also have a university connection is that right?
Clive Boddy : Yeah, that's right, I'm professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at Middlesex University in the UK.
Rob Kall : Okay, so you've got this book and you've been writing, and it's really an academic professional, this is not a book for layman, it's citing research and the target of this is academics. Or, who's the target of this book?
Clive Boddy : Yeah that's right, its basically an academic book detailing my research on corporate psychopaths and their affects on organizations. It's the research I undertook in Australia a few years ago, so yeah it's, that particular book is aimed at an academic audience. Though I am writing a popular version of it now. I'm not finished yet.
Rob Kall : So, you have a chapter in your book that's also a stand alone article in the Journal Of Business Ethics, titled "The Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis".
Clive Boddy : Yes that's right, I expanded that into a small article in that journal. It created a bit of interest among the general public and a financial of insiders.
Rob Kall : Yes, you've gotten some google exposure there, a lot of different planes. I found you with your Ted Talk on psychopaths and corporate bullies.
Clive Boddy : Yeah, yes.
Rob Kall : So I want to get an understanding of this. Recently I did an interview with Psychiatrist Donald Black who wrote a book, Bad Boys Bad Men, which is about sociopaths. Now he says sociopath and psychopaths are the same thing. There are eight and a half million of them. Now I know that others say that there are about a million psychopaths in the U.S., and that's, name Robert Hare, the author of Snakes in Suits, which is about corporate psychopaths, says. And I'm not the expert to sort out which is the right answer. Now I understand that you base your work on Hare's numbers, or at least when you talk about the numbers you use Hare's numbers, right?
Clive Boddy : Yeah, I prefer his definition of psychopaths and sociopaths as well, because he differentiates the two.
Rob Kall : Okay, could you differentiate them for us here?
Clive Boddy : Yes sure, in a nutshell, the word sociopath, because it has associations with socialization and learned behavior, implies a person who has been brought up, or cultured, or educated to be a sociopath, in other words to have a ruthless personality. Whereas a psychopath seems to be more born than made, so they are, they have a series of brain mystery, and connectivity abnormalities as you like, which seem to predispose them to have no conscience. And it's that lack of conscience that makes them ruthless towards other people, to behave in the characteristic ways of psychopaths.
Rob Kall : Heartless.
Clive Boddy : That's right yeah, totally heartless, totally ruthless and totally calculating in their approach to life.
Rob Kall : So you start your book with an introduction which is the same as the title, Corporate Psychopaths as Organization Destroyers. What do you mean by organization destroyers?
Clive Boddy : Well just as it sounds basically. What I've done is research the effect they have on other employees, and on the organizations that employ them. By using a psychopathic measure to indentify their presence in organizations, and them looking at companies where they're present compared to where they're not present. And all the key indicators that I've look at so far increase in their presence. So conflict and bullying go up enormously, work load goes up slightly, counterproductive work behavior goes up, because people take revenge against what they see as the bad behavior of the company, in the form of their psychopathic manager.
Employee emotional well being goes down, so they don't feel like they are cared for by the company, and they don't feel as if they fit in there because of the actions of their psychopathic manager again. Perceptions of organizational justice and ethics, and management credibility and trustworthy all go down in their presence because of their orientation is towards themselves rather than towards the company. It's toward themselves rather than towards other employees. And it's towards themselves rather than towards the customers. So the customers get neglected, the employees get neglected, and the company itself gets neglected. That's one way they have a destructive effect on the organization that employees them. So it's a long term series of gradually, increasingly bad organizational outcomes, which ultimately, I think, will probably result in the disintegration of the company.
Rob Kall : And there has been other research, I think it's Kiel , that's done some research on this, that's shown that internal assets, for one, is much less when a psychopath runs the company.
Clive Boddy : I haven't actually heard of that piece of research and I usually try and keep up to date on everything that's published on psychopaths.
Rob Kall : I'm not sure if that's exactly right, but I'm pretty sure that's along the lines of what he came up with, he apparently asked a lot employees to describe characteristics of their bosses, and the ones that had characteristics that made them look like psychopaths, had that result. It kind of makes sense if you're destroying the company, that it's going to make less money or lose money though.
Clive Boddy : It makes perfect sense, I'll have to look up that piece of research, Kyle you say?
Rob Kall : I'll send you the link to it when we're done. And it'll be on the page for the podcast as well.
Okay, so you say one thing, and I'm not sure where you said it, you were cited by a Bloomberg article on this, you said anyone who makes decisions that affects significant numbers of other people concerning issues of corporate responsibility or toxic waste, for example, or concerning mass financial markets or mass employment, should be screened to make sure that they are, at the very least, not psychopaths, and are at most are actually people who care about others.
Clive Boddy : Yes, I think mankind appears to be standing on the brink of so many different types of unpleasant results, in terms of the economy, in terms of the environment, in terms of overfishing in the sea, but I think we have reached the stage where we really need to make sure that the people who are leading us in organizations, or of any kind, are not psychopathic, and therefore have a conscience. Because otherwise the decisions that are being made are going to be short term, profit oriented decisions to the benefit of the managers concerned, rather than to the long term benefit of the rest of society, and the rest of mankind.
So I think we've reached critical stage, and now that we know how to identify thiese people, we have the means to to identify them, and manage them within organizations and society.
Rob Kall : Now that is my next question, do we have the means to identify them? Can they be identified so that we can prevent them from taking powerful roles where they can hurt people and companies?
Clive Boddy : Well yeah, I mean psychologists have a whole range of measures of psychopathy. So there are other report measures of psychopathy, where you ask other people to rate an individual, people who know them well, so that's a board and superiors et cetera. And there are also self report measures of psychopothy, where people complete their own questionnaires, they self complete a questionnaire, and from that you can identify whether someone's good psychopothy measures or not. There are also increasingly brain, functional magnetic resonance (FMRi) emitting brain scales, which show that the brains of these people work differently than the rest of us. So that's additional, once you get to very senior levels, that's perhaps a different kind of screen to use to identify them. And if you get all three measures, say giving the same results, a brain scan, self report measures, other report measures, then you can be pretty certain that you're dealing with somebody who is at least highly dysfunctional.
Rob Kall : Now, I've written about this event, and the commenter's have expressed concerns that this is not a mature science, that it's an art. They've expressed concern that psychopaths, if they're going to be asked questions, are going to lie. So, these self report questions for example, are they reliable? And can useful information come from them? Do people actually answer questions that end up indicating they're psychopaths? How's that work?
Clive Boddy : Well some of these self report measures, there's one called a psychopathic personality inventory, I think it's called, and that as far as I know. And that has built in measures of reliability. So you can tell whether the respondent is trying to massage the image that they give or not through their answers. So, there are concerns about them lying of course, because that's one of their stock in trades, but I think there exist sufficient variety of measures to get around that, and to pinpoint them relatively accurately.
Rob Kall : So are you doing consulting with businesses?
Clive Boddy : No, not at the moment, I'm just doing my academic research.
Rob Kall : Okay, what kind of response have you had from businesses in terms of these ideas of screening out psychopaths?
Clive Boddy : Limited response so far, I had an interesting presentation a few weeks ago. When I normally present on corporate psychopaths to people, around forty percent of people think they've worked with this kind of person. Recently, as I said, I presented to a group of HR directors, and the interesting difference there was that all of them thought they worked with this kind of person. And I suppose because of the nature of their jobs, where they're dealing with senior people and recruiting people and interviewing people and assessing them, and they're bound to come across them more often because they come across more people than the rest of us do. And they were very interested in the whole thing, and very worried about it as well. Because from their own experience they found it incredibly difficult to manage these people, and especially when they were higher levels than the HR directors in the organization, which often they were. We're just doing some research, with those HR directors to discover a bit more about this, and how they've coped with the psychopaths or potential psychopaths.
Rob Kall : Do the HR directors screen out psychopaths? Are they doing anything at all to keep them out? Whether its intuitively or face judgment, or is there anything that they're doing now?
Clive Boddy : To the best of my knowledge no, they're not looking for psychopathy in screening people. I believe one or two armed forces, and one or two police forces arouund the world try to screen out psychopaths for obvious reasons. But as far as I know they're the only organizations that do it. You mentioned that corporate psychopaths and the global financial crisis. There was a report in the UK newspaper, after that came out, that the corporate bank, or at least one corporate bank in the UK was screening them in rather than screening the man. So the reporter was talking about his theory to a friend of his, who was a corporate banker, and the banker said to him, "We used a psychopathy measure to recruit new employees." So you can use it, preferably to screen them out, but its incredible to hear that they were using it to screen them in. And I've been tracking some subjects through that research but I haven't got any yet.
Rob Kall : Term pack of wolves comes to mind.
Clive Boddy : It's unbelievable yes. It's mind boggling.
Rob Kall : It's hard to imagine somebody would intentionally hire psychopaths.
Clive Boddy : Well presumably they thought they were getting ultra ruthless, cut throat, competitive new employees who would help the business. But it's a very short term and risky thing to do.
Rob Kall : Do you know the name of the company?
Clive Boddy : No I haven't been able to find out which bank it was. As I say I would love to do some further research into this but I haven't been able to yet.
Rob Kall : Now you've said that companies tend to avoid even talking about this or dealing with this, they sweep it under the carpet, or pretend it doesn't exist, and then pay off people who've been bullied by psychopaths. And then the bully, the psychopath gets promoted.
Clive Boddy : Well that was, I think you've taken that from my Ted speech on bullying, and that was more in relation to bullies and bullying in general rather than just psychopathic bullying. Companies find it very difficult I think to deal with bullying, and from my limited experience of it, they as you said, they tend to try and sweep it under the carpet, or just ignore it and hope it will go away on its own. But it is a huge problem in companies around the world, as even a peripheral examination on bullying will show you that, will show you why.
Rob Kall : You're listening to the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show, or watching on YouTube. So what is the difference between a bully and a psychopath?
Clive Boddy : Well I think people come to be bully's for a variety of different reasons, including their upbringing, the way they've been taught to deal with other people, whereas a psychopath bully's for more instrumental reasons, they tend to bullying to create in groups and out groups, they tend to bully to show other people that they're not to be taken lightly and shouldn't be challenged, unless the people who are challenging them can expect to be, to meet some degree of force in retaliation. So they're spreading a ruthless reputation for themselves so people tend to leave them alone, and that enables them to get on with what they're really doing, which is self aggrandization and self promotion. But they also, they'll create divide and conquer tactics, they'll instigate bullying among other people. Some people will start to bully people in the out group that the psychopath has created. So to try and create, to get in favor with the psychopath to make sure they're not bullied themselves. So they create a culture I think of bullying and intimidation that goes on around them. So it's not just them doing it, it's them facilitating other people to do it as well, and creating the environment in which bullying flourishes.
Rob Kall : You did a study looking at bully's and psychopaths and bullies among managers, right?
Clive Boddy : Yup.
Rob Kall : What did you find?
Clive Boddy : Well I found in the presence of corporate psychopaths within an organization, all types of conflict go on. So arguments go through the roof, yelling goes up, conflict goes up, and bullying goes up enormously. And the presence of psychopaths in my Australian research seemed to account for about, I think its twenty six percent of all bullying, or a quarter. In some research I've just writing up in the UK, I've found even more, I've found about a third of all bullying is due to the presence of corporate psychopaths. So when they're not there, there's hardly any bullying, but when they are there, there's often frequent and repetitive bullying.
Rob Kall : What percentage are psychopaths in the corporate setting?
Clive Boddy : Well I follow Hare again on this, it seems to be about one percent of the whole population, therefore there's no real reason to believe that, I mean less than one percent shouldn't be in organizations. But the theory is that they're better at getting promoted than other people are, because of their superficial charm, and there willingness to lie, and their willingness to manipulate other people, their willingness to claim the good work of others as there own work, the lack of remorse about what they do and how they do it. And so it seems to be, from some studies that have been published in the U.S., that it could be three and a half percent of senior managers who are corporate psychopaths. There may well be on, top of that, an institutional effect, because they are after power, money, and prestige. They will tend to go towards the organizations that can provide those types of rewards. So that means they're probably trying to avoid the caring professions, for example nursing maybe-- that comes to mind, and go towards, gravitate towards the financial services, corporate banking services in particular. And so the three and a half percent at the top of most organizations, may be even more when in the corporate banking sector, and especially if they've actually been recruiting these people to begin with.
Rob Kall : Do psychopaths, are they able to work with other psychopaths? And what does that look like? That sounds really scary.
Clive Boddy : It is really scary. I've just started reading about political psychopaths, and I found that Adolf Hitler was diagnosed by a Norwegian psychiatrist in 1933, long before his major atrocities, committed he was diagnosed as a psychopath. His deputy Hess was diagnosed as a psychopath by a British psychiatrist in 1941, when he flew to Scotland. Goebbels was diagnosed as a psychopath at the Nuremberg war trials by a U.S. psychiatrist. So all three of the top Nazi's were psychopaths. So that answers the question can they work together and what happens when they do? So when they do work together, not only do they have no conscience of their own to restrain their behavior, but those around them have no conscience as well, so the whole thing just becomes nightmarishly bad to the point of being evil, I think you'd say.
Rob Kall : How are corporate psychopaths different from other psychopaths?
Clive Boddy : We think that they have better executive control abilities, stemming from, either their better educational background and socioeconomic upbringing, or it might be brain event related as well, but that's relatively unexplored at the moment. Psychiatrists, because the first people to study psychopaths were prison psychologist, like Robert Hare for example, and because psychopaths are easy to find in present populations, there is now confusion between what the criminals do and what the psychopaths do. There was a confounding issue. What people tended to forget, that psychopaths exist among us in society, working alongside us. And they aren't always the very antisocial, very violent individuals that we have come to associate with psychopathy. So, they're more restrained, they can control and modify their behavior better, in terms of its violent outbursts, and therefore they can exist relatively successfully in organizations, and get to the top through other means, or through the means of manipulation that we've talked about.
Rob Kall : Have there been any CEO's or high executives in corporations who have been clearly identified as psychopaths, that you can name?
Clive Boddy : Because it's such a value laden term, hardly any CEO's, so far, have been named as psychopaths. There are obvious candidates, who might be associated with having a high psychopathy score. And I am just in the process of writing about those people at the moment, by comparing what they have done in history, to common measures of psychopothy. So a potential candidate, for example would be a guy called Robert Maxwell, in the UK, who used to be a media baron, he owned the Daily Mirror, for example, he was found to have defrauded the pension fund of about three hundred million pounds, I think it was at the time, back in the late eighties early nineties. When the fraud scandal was about to emerge into the spotlight of the media, he reportedly fell off his yacht in the Atlantic and drowned. But he's been mentioned in a few websites and a few newspapers as a possible candidate for a high
Rob Kall : So part of the criteria for diagnosing a CEO or a high level corporate executive is to be dead first? (laughing)
Clive Boddy : It makes the possibility of libel less uh,
Rob Kall : That's true the libel laws in the UK are much tougher than they are in the U.S. aren't they?
Clive Boddy : Uh, yes. Several websites in the U.S. do name people, but I'm not at liberty to repeat those names I think here.
Rob Kall : Now you have talked about Enron.
Clive Boddy : Uh yes, I mean these spectacular corporate collapses, seem to have been driven by the very, what's the right word, self aggrandizing CEO's and CFO's within the organizations. If those people, were psychopaths, then certainly the type of behavior, the type of conclusions that came about because of their presence would be expected from corporate psychopaths. So, I mean fraud is the most commonly expected act from having a psychopath, but so far there's no research that definitely links the two. But every psychologist who writes about them, thinks they will engage in fraudulent behavior. It's just that the connection in research hasn't been made yet from a scientific point of view.
Rob Kall : Now you mention in a couple different places, "dark leadership". What's that?
Clive Boddy: Well it's just a broader term called dark, or toxic leadership. A broader term for corporate psychopaths, I think corporate psychopaths are one of three different types of dark leaders if you like. The next would be Machiavellians which would be somebody who is willing to do something regardless of the consequences to other people. And narcissists is the other one, who are people who basically love themselves too much, and they expect the admiration of those around them. So, they have been called the dark triad, in psychology literature for example. Theoretically I think psychopaths would be the most destructive, because there's nothing to say that Machiavellians and narcissists don't have a conscience. I think the literature sort of assumes that they do have a conscience, therefore they have a better side to them which can be appealed too, whereas you can't, there's nothing to appeal too with a psychopath. In fact, they would see appeals as a form of weakness, a sign of weakness, rather than anything else.
Rob Kall : Lets talk a little bit about your corporate psychopaths theory of the global financial crisis. What is it, and what kind of response have you had to your theory?
Clive Boddy : Well, it's the theory that corporate psychopaths in senior positions in corporate banks, in the UK and the U.S. and around the world, for that matter, had an influence on the spiraling levels of debt, and the manufacturing of these derivative products which appear to have no social or economic function other than to create paper profits, and therefore bonuses for the managers concerned.
These products were so complex that the people selling them didn't even understand them, and didn't understand therefore the riskiness of them. And then that begs the question of course what kind of people will sell the product that they don't understand themselves, and don't understand the risk of themselves. And it's got to be someone who's deficient at least in their conscience, and their empathy for other people.
So the theory was that, because modern organizations are becoming more and more fluid, we don't get to know the people that we work with like we used too. If you worked with someone in a company for twenty five years, you would get to know if there were elements of their personality were strange or abhorrent or ruthless, you'd get to know that. You'd get to know how they treated their family, how they treated their wives, how they treated other people around them, and it might start ringing alarm bells as to their credibility, and their suitability for management positions.
But because modern organizations are so fluid and fast, so they have mergers and acquisitions, you have very fast turn over of personal, especially in key positions these days. So nobody gets to know anybody, and therefore those who can give the best facade of being charming and sociable, and capable get to the top quicker than perhaps more introverted people, or people who are less capable of putting themselves in a good light in such a short term meeting, or a short term of getting to know them. So the theory is that psychopaths are getting to the top more and more because of what's happening in terms of personnel turnover and in terms of the way companies recruit people, promote them, within organizations. Therefore, they got to the top more in the corporate banking sector, and I think they'd be especially attracted to that sector because of the power and the money and prestige that can be earned within it. Especially as we've just discussed, at least one bank was using a psychopothy measure to recruit people, so their influence on the banks would be in an ethically negative direction, and they would effect the whole corporate culture to be more and more ruthless, more and more ego driven, more and more risk taking. So they develop a sociopathic culture around the senior psychopaths who were there. And if you throw in a couple of Machiavellian and narcissists into the top management team as well, and you have the recipe where psychopaths can get to do what they want, and can implement the organizational decisions, that they favor for typically short term results, and short term bonuses.
Rob Kall : It seems to me, that what you're describing is the collapse of community and connectedness among people in companies. Because if you have more of that then, these kinds of behaviors are going to be more easily identified and detected and talked about and brought to leadership.
Clive Boddy : Yes, I think that's a good point. Where you have more and more connections you've got greater chance of identifying them in the first place, and therefore restraining their influence, or restraining their gaining of management positions.
Rob Kall : It makes me think, and I call my show the Bottom Up Radio Show, most of the interviews I do are related to the idea that there's the transition from a top down to a bottom up world, our culture, our brains, and that people are getting more connected in some ways, but at the same time there are problems that are affecting our connections. Like globalization hurts community, consumer culture hurts community, and it seems to me that those kinds of things are having this side effect really, that leads to opening up corporations to being more vulnerable or susceptible to allowing entry to these kinds of predators into their upper echelons.
Clive Boddy : Yes I agree with that. I think one of the things that can perhaps constrain it is, there are a number of large European companies that tend to recruit at the graduate level, and then they keep the people within the company, over a long term career. And through doing that they can get to know the people in greater depth, the employees in greater depth and prevent them, the more abberant personalities from getting to the top. But suddenly even those companies, who do traditionally do that, are now starting to look outside their own ranks to recruit people. And as soon as you start bringing in people who you don't know the true character of, then of course there's the danger of bringing in somebody whose too ruthless and too psychopathic.
