Paul Fisher
The economic slowdown is creating a fertile environment for corporate psychopaths, an industrial and organisational psychologist has revealed.
Paul Babiak, co-author of Snakes in Suits – When Psychopaths Go to Work, issued the stark warning to business coaches at the 2008 Meyler Campbell annual lecture on 12 November.
Psychopaths thrive on chaos, he said, and the frenzied nature of modern business, with downsizing and reorganisations, is perfect for them.
Psychopaths may enter companies as corporate saviours but before long will inflict considerable damage including low morale, ill-informed decision-making, increased risk and reduced productivity.
But identifying corporate psychopaths is difficult. Like good leaders they are also charming, charismatic and larger than life. They look and dress the same way as most business people, are fun to be around and, at first glance, seem to demonstrate strong leadership skills.
In reality they are unable to build teams, have no respect for individuals, lack integrity and wisdom, and are only interested in their own success – not that of the company.
In research by Babiak and Robert Hare among 200 executives from eight international companies, 3.5 per cent were found to have psychopathic tendencies.
Babiak said psychopaths believe in their own superiority over other people and over the law. Blame always lies with the next person.
Ideal environments for psychopaths include flat, non-hierarchical organisations; ever-changing roles; inadequate performance measurement systems; fast career moves and risk taking all of which have been prevalent in some businesses over the past few years.
He outlined Hare’s Psychopathy ChecklistRevised(PCL-R), a psycho-diagnostic tool built on criminal data that provides a clinical rating scale for 20 characteristics of psychopaths.
Using the Psychopathy Checklist as a basis, he described how he and Hare have developed the ‘B-Scan’, a non-clinical tool rooted in business language that can assess corporate managers, identify potentially destructive individuals and contribute to selection, management development and succession planning.
It is based on four features: personal style, emotional style, organisational effectiveness and social responsibility. In a question and answer session following Babiak’s presentation. a number of questions rocused on the implications for coaching the corporate psychopath.
The general agreement was that one should not coach psychopaths. The key question, however, was how to identify such people.
Coaching at Work - January/February 2009
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