Toxic Boss Syndrome

Note: You can point your friends and colleagues to this page with the web address http://xrl.us/35qk (easier to write down or spell out loud).

A very good friend of mine is having problems with their boss.  In my opinion as an ex-psychologist and management researcher, this person is a corporate psychopath.  I did some work on the personality profile of psychopaths a few years ago, and also had a fair amount of professional dealing with people suffering a variety of personality disorders.  So what I'm going to do here is to write a little about how to identify a corporate psychopath, and look at your options as to what you can do about it.  By way of warning, there are no easy solutions, and most of the things that you can normally do to fix difficult social situations will not work.

What is a corporate psychopath?

The ABC Catalyst show had a nice segment on corporate psychopaths here  (video is available from that page) They have a 6 question checklist on their website (here).  The theory is that the more yes answers you provide, the higher the chance you do have a real toxic boss.  I don't particularly like the questionnaire - it's missing some important personality attributes like:

• Does your boss use bullying and intimidation as their primary management technique?
  
• Is your boss impulsive?
• Does your boss make frequent mistakes which they cover up by denial or blaming other people?
• Does your boss apparently not suffer from anxiety?
• Does your boss make decisions without consulting the rest of his team?
• Does your boss try to set members of his team against each other through manipulative behaviour?
• Is your boss completely self-centred (narcissistic)?
• Does your boss have lax personal ethics in the way they deal with other people?
  

What does "psychopath" mean?

A psychopath is someone that lacks empathy.  This means that they are unable to see the world from another person's point of view.  This is the core of the problem.  Imagine a child who is born without the ability to see colour.  As they progress through their life, there is a lot of stuff that they can't see, and have never experienced, so it is very difficult, perhaps impossible for them to appreciate what colour is, and the value that it brings to the experience of other people.  Colours are concrete things that people use for information (e.g. traffic lights), and we tend to talk about them a lot, so people with complete colour blindness realise early on that there's a problem and work on strategies to deal with the problem.

People who don't have the ability to feel empathy similarly develop strategies to deal with their disability, but because other people's feelings are much more abstract than colours, and because people communicate about them in different ways (compared to colour) the afflicted individual is unlikely to see it as a problem, and they will develop strange ways of dealing with it that are focused on manipulating the people around them.

This means that a psychopath will have a fundamentally different set of motivations than the rest of the population.  They don't recognise the existence of other people's feelings, and so their perspective in social situations are quite alien for normal people.  In general their motivations are to get other people to do exactly what they want, with a complete disregard for the consequences.

Because of the severity of this problem, some psychopaths are unable to live by society's rules, because these rules are completely alien to them.  These people are criminal psychopaths and probably account for about 10% of the prison population.  Psychopaths who can internalise some kind of  rule system can live reasonably normal lives, but will make the lives of those around them very difficult.  One way a psychopath can internalise a set of rules that could keep them out of trouble would be from an upbringing that stresses the importance of authority, and presents simple rules to live by - e.g. in some kinds of religious situations.  However, they are likely to strive obtain a position of authority for themselves, because they get big internal rewards from being able to control other people's behaviour.

The overall incidence of psychopathy in the population is about 1%. About 2% of senior managers fit the criteria for psychopathy, and as mentioned above, about 10% of the prison population.

Why do psychopaths do better in management positions?

I must admit that I don't fully understand this.  Two things come to mind.  Firstly in a hyper-competitive world like the modern workplace, ruthless individuals have an advantage.  Coupled with this, because psychopaths live in a kind of "parallel reality" where normal values and rules are for exploitation of personal advantage rather than for promoting social harmony, this provides them with a perceptual advantage.

What are the outcomes for organisations dominated by corporate psychopaths?

Very bad.  The American company Enron, which collapsed due to poor accountability is often cited an example of this.  Robert Maxwell, a British media tycoon whose business empire colapsed shortly after he committed suicide is another example.  In the aftermath  it was discovered that he'd stolen the company pension fund.

In larger organisations, corporate psychopaths can "hide" and their activities are marked by high staff turnover, poor outcomes for staff and poor overall performance that can severly affect the health of the organisation.  Poor staff outcomes can include sleep loss, an increase in mental health problems

What can you do about a corporate psychopath if you're working with one?

Unfortunately very little.  The simplest course of action is to leave.  However, this is often not a possibility and besides, it just makes it someone else's problem.  Two things not to do:

1.   Don't approach your boss about the problem.

Really, don't no matter how tempting!  Problems in social situations have a completely different meaning to them than to you.  Alerting them to the problem  sends the psychopath a strong signal; it shows them that they have leverage over you and clarifies the buttons that they can press to manipulate you.  To the psychopath you do not have a complicated internal life, and you are there exclusively for their benefit and for them to control.

2.  Don't arrange for rehabilitation.

If you can communicate the problem to your boss' management, management may chose to try to rehabilitate them.  This will not work for much the same reason that alerting them to a personal problem will not work. Providing them with rehabilitation will give them a valuable learning experience, and enable them to expand their repertoire of techniques for manipulating and controlling people.

So what can you do?

Aside from resigning, if it's possible to  do the very difficult job of alerting their managers to the problem, along with stressing that rehabilitation will not have the intended consequences, then there may be some hope. The psychopath should have a job that minimises interaction with other people.  This will mean removing their authority for core functions of their job.  In most cases dismissal is the only long term solution. This will have major benefits to the organisation and for the staff formerly working under this person.

There are professionals who can assess the extent and severity of this disability, and if possible they should be used.  They can help you to provide an appropriate intervention, but in almost all cases, the best intervention is dismissal,and as quickly as possible. Where possible, references should be refused , so that the problem is not passed on to someone else.

Further information.

The problem of workplace psychopaths has only been recognised relatively recently.  If you want to find out more, I recommend watching the Catalyst segment I mentioned at the beginning.  If you want to look at the academic literature, visit Google Scholar, or your favourite search engine,  and search for "corporate psychopath", "industrial psychopath" or "snakes in suits" (this last one is the name of a book).  Please use the comments section here for questions or examples of your own experiences.