Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work (14 page)

Despite the problems and challenges associated with joining a large business, there is much to be gained, and psychopaths, like most of us, assess the risks against the potential reward. There is the opportunity to make a lot of money, to gain status and power, and all the perquisites that go with them. The psychopaths’ ability to take advantage of a company—commit fraud, steal, abuse coworkers, make a big salary—while being in its employ, requires more sophistication than the simple social manipulation they present out in public. For the corporate psychopath, this is the ultimate challenge.

We know that individuals with psychopathic personalities are
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prone to lying, rule breaking, and deceit. To be successful in an organization, they would have to operate covertly, that is, under the radar, cognizant of the policies, rules, regulations, and official codes of conduct, but able to circumvent them for a significant amount of time.

They would have to manipulate many coworkers and managers into believing their lies, while neutralizing the negative impact of any coworkers who discovered (and threatened to uncover) their lies and deceit. To manipulate coworkers, compliance systems, and management observations consistently would be very difficult, possibly beyond the ability of all but the most talented and persistent. Few psychopaths would have the wherewithal to try it, and those who did would fail quickly. Or so it once was thought.

Organizational Manipulation

To understand the success of the corporate psychopath, we must realize that textbook bureaucracies rarely exist and in modern times seldom survive. Instead, organizational structures, processes, and culture are always evolving and developing toward an ideal whose picture is, at best, unclear and ever changing. This constant change and uncertainty causes stress for most employees and managers, but opens the door for the psychopath.

Babiak has shown that psychopaths may have little difficulty influencing others even on the job, where their manipulations may attract more attention. This is best understood in the context of a case.

During a long-term consulting assignment, many years ago, Babiak had the experience of working with a psychopath without knowing it at the time.

I was asked to work with a project team that was experiencing a decline in its overall productivity and a significant increase in conflict. Some team members had even asked to be transferred to other projects, despite the prestige associated with working on
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this high-performing team. When questioned by management, the team leader and some members said they did not know what was causing the difficulty. A team-building program was launched for the team members in an attempt to isolate the problems and help the team regain its previous high-performance levels.

Interviews with team members, observations from coworkers in other departments and other management, and review of relevant human resources documents provided a preliminary picture of what was happening. Many members of the team felt that one of its members was the primary cause of its problems, but were afraid to come forward. They reported to me, privately, that this individual circumvented team processes and procedures, caused conflict, acted rudely in meetings, and did more to derail progress than to promote it. He often showed up late to meetings, and when he finally would arrive, he hadn’t completed the tasks he was assigned, routinely blaming others for his failures. Some suggested that he bullied, even threatened, team members who did not agree with him. At every turn, he undercut the leader’s role on the team, who also happened to be his boss.

Some other members of the team felt differently, though.

They told me that he was a solid performer whose ideas were both creative and innovative. This group of supporters said that he was a true leader and contributed toward the team’s objectives. A few members of the management committee even commented that they thought this person had the potential for promotion into a management position someday. Depending on whom you were speaking with, you would get a different picture of this person. It was as if these groups of coworkers were describing two different people instead of one. The behaviors of this individual and the different reactions of the various team members—that is, the split between supporters and detractors—

suggested that something more than mere office politics and interpersonal conflict was going on behind the scenes. But what?

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A subsequent review of this person’s record by the personnel department revealed that he had lied on his résumé and did not have the essential experience or education that he claimed to have. The security department also discovered that he routinely took home company supplies of significant monetary value for personal use; the auditing department also found several suspicious inconsistencies in his expense account. The division between the supporters’ view and the detractors’ view became even wider as more and more information was forthcoming.

Local management reviewed much of this information, but, unfortunately, before any action could be taken, senior management reorganized the departments involved, and the team was disbanded. The team leader was moved to another location and the individual who was at the center of the controversy was given a promotion—into his boss’s job—and a leadership role in the department.

I considered this case for a long time after the business relationship ended but was unable to satisfactorily explain all the discrepancies (only some examples reported here). One day, while rereading a copy of Cleckley’s book, I realized that the controversial team member might have a psychopathic personality. My field notes and documents were filled with examples of behaviors similar to those mentioned by Cleckley and studied by Hare. Perhaps psychopathy would explain most of the conflicting observations made by so many people so close to the individual. Using the information available, I completed the Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version (PCL: SV) on this person, just as an experiment. The results were startling.

This individual came out very close to the PCL: SV cut score for psychopathy—a score much higher than that expected even for most serious offenders. The PCL: SV also yields four subscores (see page 27) that reflect psychopathic features in four areas: Interpersonal, Affective, Lifestyle, and Antisocial.

Known criminal psychopaths tend to score high on all four,
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while those like the reader score low on each one. The individual who caused such controversy on the team scored high on the first two factors and moderately on the other two. This profile indicated that he was grandiose, manipulative, deceptive, and lacking in empathy and concern for others, but also that he was less impulsive or overtly antisocial than most psychopaths. He had not broken the law or seriously victimized others, at least as far as we knew.

During the next few years, several individuals working in other businesses were brought to my attention by employees who felt that they had been victimized by coworkers. Business executives and human resources professionals, following public speaking engagements and education sessions about psychopathy, also shared war stories about individuals whose behaviors had caused some difficulties at their companies. In some cases, I had enough information to complete the PCL: SV on them. Some exhibited the same profile as the individual noted above, but some did not—they were merely problematic employees engaged in counterproductive or deviant work behavior for reasons unrelated to psychopathic personality.

Female Psychopaths

“Why aren’t there any female psychopaths,” an interviewer asked one of the authors. The fact that she could ask such a question reflects a curious wrinkle on sexism: the view, held by many people, that relatively few female psychopaths exist in society—or even prisons—and that those who do exist differ in fundamental ways from their male counterparts.

The issue is clouded by sex-role biases in the diagnosis of the disorder. Thus, when a female and a male each exhibit a psychopathic pattern of core personality traits—grandiose, egocentric, selfish, irresponsible, manipulative, deceitful, emotionally shallow, callous, and lacking in empathy, remorse, and guilt—a clinician
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will often diagnose the male as a psychopath (or antisocial personality disorder) and the female as something else, usually histrionic or narcissistic personality disorder (see page 40). In each case, the clinician’s diagnosis is influenced by expectations of how psychopaths should behave. That is, the clinician expects psychopaths to be tough, dominant, and aggressive, and a woman who does not project these characteristics therefore is not a psychopath. What the clinician fails to understand is that the behaviors of male and female psychopaths, like those of most other people, are shaped by the sex-role stereotypes cultivated by society. The same underlying personality structure may find different behavioral and social expression.

Although the process of socialization fails to embed in the psyche of psychopaths the network of inner controls we refer to collectively as
conscience
, it nevertheless makes them aware of society’s expectations about sex roles, about what is expected of them as men and women. More than most people, they effectively use these expectations as potent tools for manipulation. So a female psychopath might make full use of the passive, warm, nurturing, and dependent sex-role stereotype in order to get what she wants out of others, just as a male psychopath might use a macho image, intimidation, and aggression to achieve satisfaction of his desires.

Female psychopaths effectively use society’s expectations about female behavior to their own advantage. But, more than most women, they also are able to break out of the traditional sex-role stereotypes, to go beyond conventional boundaries. This is readily apparent among female offenders, where the prevalence of psychopaths is almost as high as it is among male offenders. The variety and severity of criminal acts performed by these women, as well as their capacity for cold-blooded violence, are similar to those committed by their male counterparts.

Sex-role stereotypes about the behavior of women are changing rapidly. In a sense, the public is just catching up with a reality that long has been recognized by writers and those in the entertainment business. Female psychopaths frequently are well portrayed in fiction, true-crime books, television, and movies.

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Over the years, we were able to collect more information on how some of these individuals—industrial or corporate psychopaths—

interacted with coworkers and management over extended periods.

Gradually, a consistent pattern emerged, a pattern eerily similar to the parasitic lifestyle described in chapter 3. Based on all our observations, it is now clear that a small number of individuals with psychopathic personality features can be found in some business organizations. Some highly motivated individuals with psychopathic personalities (as assessed by the Hare PCL-R or PCL: SV) were able to enter an organization, evaluate strengths and weaknesses in its culture (processes, communication networks, corporate politics), use and abuse coworkers, “deal with” opposition, and climb the corporate ladder. How they did it, and more important, why they were so successful, took a number of studies and a bit of time to fully understand and answer. When cases were compared side by side, some similarities were noted, with almost every industrial or corporate psychopath following a similar career progression. These individuals were able to enter the corporation, adapt to its culture, and manipulate coworkers and executives, as described in detail below and in the next chapter.

Entering the Corporation

The initial challenge for any psychopath trying to join a company is, of course, to be hired. Like psychopaths who easily enter people’s personal lives, corporate psychopaths are able to join organizations more easily than one might expect. This is because the standard techniques used to screen out underqualified individuals are well known and little match for the psychopath’s lying and manipulative skills.

The typical selection process involves reviewing the résumés of job candidates for the knowledge, skills, abilities, and attitudes needed to do a good job. On the surface, the process seems quite straightforward, but it involves a lot of planning and effort and is not foolproof. For midlevel and lower-level jobs, lists of requirements
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can be gleaned by watching current employees who exhibit outstanding performance records. However, when the job is new and there are no incumbents, supervisors and human resources professionals create the lists based on research from other, similar companies. Once there is a clear sense of what is wanted in the job applicant, then each candidate can be evaluated through detailed probing and questioning by interviewers.

This process is especially effective for technical jobs or those that can be quantified such as those found in research and development.

But as one moves up the corporate ladder into jobs with greater scope and less clear responsibilities, the task becomes more difficult.

“Strategic planning,” “critical thinking,” “freedom to act,” “leadership,” and other variables must be added to the list—and these are much more difficult to quantify. This makes selecting the most qualified job candidate difficult, and “gut feel” or “chemistry” begins to take on more of a role in decision making about who is the best candidate for the job. This is most evident during face-to-face interviewing, exactly the place where the psychopath shines. The less clearly defined—or higher level—the job, the easier it is for a psychopath to be hired.

It is common knowledge among executive recruiters that 15 percent or more of the résumés they receive contain distortions or outright lies. Psychopaths, whose personalities are defined by chronic lying, among other things, are quite adept at creating written documentation—résumés, letters of recommendation, citations, and awards—out of whole cloth. They can fabricate a work history custom-tailored to the job requirements, and back it up with phony references, job samples, and appropriate jargon.