Rob Kall: Okay,
so tell me a little bit about how psychopaths operate within a corporation.
What do they do? And how do they, what kind of behaviors do they engage in that
get them forward, that hurt others, that hurt the company? How do they deal
with times when they are being
threatened or where somebody's calling them out, or anything like that?
Can you give some detail, more detailed descriptions of their behaviors?
Clive Boddy:
Yeah, I think they, when they're going into an organization, they start to
formulate a plan as to how they can advance themselves by manipulating and
using other people. So they might identify key gatekeepers in the organization,
who can help them get to important people. They'll do things like if they make a mistake,
they'll blame other people for it. If someone working for them does very good
work, they'll claim the credit that work for themselves. They'll try and
anticipate anybody who is going to try and undermine their position, and
they'll try to undermine that position first. So if somebody who, if somebody
who works for psychopaths was going to support them to their own superior,
above the psychopath, the psychopath might go to that person first and say,
"I'm having trouble with this guy, I think he doesn't like my management
style, he's being a bit disruptive", and so he undermines that person, and
when that person goes to report on the psychopath, the boss figure has already
been warned about him, and therefore doesn't believe what he says about the
psychopath. So they are in a strategic game, and the rest of the people in the
company don't realize they're in a game, they think its just a normal social interaction.
And because they're planning it ahead of everyone else, that gives them the
advantage and ability to get ahead of people before people even realize what's
happening, and by the time they do realize, it's too late to do anything about
it.
Rob Kall: Now you
did a study with three hundred plus management people, where you included on
the questionnaire some items that would help identify psychopaths, correct?
Clive Boddy: Yes,
that's right.
Rob Kall: So how
many psychopaths did you find?
Clive Boddy: Well
we weren't looking for individual psychopaths, we were looking for people who
had worked with them, or people whose current manager scored highly enough on
the psychopothy scale, or measure, to be classed as a corporate psychopath.
Rob Kall: So you
were actually doing a questionnaire to identify managers of the employees taking
the questionnaire?
Clive Boddy:
That's right. So we asked them about their current manager, and within those
questions is a psychopothy measure, and if the current manager scores highly
enough on that measure, then we'll call them a corporate psychopath. We found,
in Australia, we found that I think it was about 5.75% of people were working
with a current manager who could be described as a psychopath, because they
scored highly on the measure I was using. In the UK, iwe did the same thing,
but it was a different set of organizations, it was more marketing services
oriented, rather than a general managerial population, and we found about 9% of
people were working with a corporate psychopath in that environment. So, statistically
speaking, there was no difference between the two as a test of statistical
differences. But still it was an interesting finding.
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