Psychopathy in the Corporate World
Psychopathy is defined as a human disorder involving antisocial behaviour and affective abnormalities. The Psychopathy Checklist-revised (PCL-R) is a psychological assessment tool used to assess psychopathy in individuals. It was mainly used in the criminal justice system but is becoming more important to the clinical system and society in general. In the justice system, PCL-R is used to indicate potential risks posed by prisoners. The results have been used in determining length and type of sentence and the treatments they should receive and those that they should not.
Corporate psychopathy has been discovered to be a trait possessed by many employees in the corporate world. Such disorders contribute to deviant workplace behaviours (Cheang and Appelbaum, 2015). Organizations should adapt their practices to identify and manage employees who have tendencies towards corporate psychopathy. Employees getting into management training programmes should therefore be administered with the PCL-R to ascertain that the organizations are not hiring psychopaths. Also, doing it before training will make them lack time to establish a façade of an ideal employee and future leader with their co-workers and the management.
While there has been plenty of literature on the relationship between clinical psychopathy and criminal behaviour, research in the business context where successful psychopaths operate has been scarce (Lingnau et al., 2017). As psychopaths are 1% of the population, it is logical to say that psychopaths are working in every large company (Boddy et al., 2010). Little research has, however, been done on psychopathy in the corporate world. It could be because psychopaths have a way of hiding their true selves in clear sight and displaying proper personal traits admirable by their co-workers and the management. It could also be because many psychopaths are in charge of senior positions in the corporate world where their failure could be blamed on their subordinates.
References
Boddy, R., Ladyshewsky, R., and Galvin, P. (2010) The influence of corporate psychopaths on corporate social responsibility and organizational commitment to employees https://www.jstor.org/stable/40929370?seq=1
Cheang, H., Appelbaum, S. (2015, June) Corporate psychopathy: Deviant workplace behaviour and toxic leaders https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279743606_Corporate_psychopathy_Deviant_workplace_behaviour_and_toxic_leaders_-_Part_one
Lingnau, V., Fuchs, F., and Niemann, T. (2017) The influence of psychopathic traits on the acceptance of white-collar crime: do corporate psychopaths cook the books and misuse the news? https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11573-017-0864-6