Bankrate.com
Coping with workplace psychos
Thursday April 14, 6:00 am ET
Jay MacDonald
Do you like psycho movies? Here's something really scary: You might work with one.
You're thinking, "Hmmm, maybe that quiet new co-worker with the piercings or the brooding swing shift janitor?"
Perhaps, but chances are just as good, and maybe better, that the psycho in your workplace is your boss, his boss, perhaps even your CEO.
Now can you hear the lambs, Clarice?
As many as one in 100 adults in the workplace is a psychopath, according to the forthcoming "Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work" by Robert D. Hare, Ph.D., professor emeritus in psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and Paul Babiak, Ph.D., a New York-based industrial-organizational psychologist. Not surprisingly, psychopaths comprise as much as a quarter of the prison population.
There also are a few psychos that manage to find a home in the workplace. Most of them aren't likely to slice and dice in their off hours like Wall Street wiz Patrick Bateman in "American Psycho" or sauté their neighbors like Hannibal Lecter in "Silence of the Lambs." But their innate charm, lust for thrills and lack of conscience can exact similar damage on the careers of those who stand in their way.
Unless you can find a way to have your company's psycho moved from the corner office to the local sanitarium, you're going to have to find a way to work with (or around) that person in order to hang onto your job. It helps to cope when you know a little about what makes such a person tick.
Practical demon-keeping
"Psychopaths know the difference between right and wrong, but they think it's amusing that you and I differentiate it," says Babiak. "They don't see a separation between what's mine and what's yours; what I own is theirs. They don't see my ownership of property or even my life as something valuable that they need to respect."
According to Hare, psychopaths share this laundry list of abnormalities:
lack of remorse or empathy
shallow emotions
manipulativeness
lying
egocentricity
glibness
low frustration tolerance
episodic relationships
parasitic lifestyle
persistent violation of social norms
Pedophiles and serial killers only represent the extreme end of the spectrum. What Babiak found in his workplace studies is that many psychos actually excel in the business environment, where charm and self-confidence easily mask their duplicitous nature.
"Some of the people were high in the personality aspects, meaning they had characteristic psychopathic features, but they weren't overly violent or antisocial. Which kind of makes sense because they have been successful in business," he says. "When they did present antisocial behavior, it was dressing down someone in public or backstabbing behavior. Bob Hare calls them 'subcriminal psychopaths.'"
David L. Weiner, chairman and CEO of Marketing Support Inc., a Chicago-based brand agency, has known a CEO or two who fit the characteristics he examines in his book, "Power Freaks."
He recalls one top exec who wore a bulletproof vest, kept a gun handy and disinherited his son with a one-paragraph letter because he was offended by something his erstwhile heir said. "You thought, talking to him, that you were in the asylum," Weiner recalls.
Weiner says a corporate culture that turns a blind eye to aggressive one-upmanship is a perfect breeding ground for psychopathic bullies.
"There are two ways to become a bully; either you're a psychopath or you mimic psychopathic traits. You have no feelings of shame or guilt; you're basically uninhibited. And you're a bit of a sadist, so you're aggressive. You sort of get a high out of bullying people."
But Babiak says there's an important clinical difference between the psychopath and the garden-variety bully.
"Studies indicate that bullies are actually inept people who are not talented, maybe have a rage against themselves that they express outward toward people they see as being better than they are. It's from a point of weakness that they express their violence toward others. They need the audience," he says.
"The psychopath operates from a point of strength; he or she is playing the game themselves and they don't need an audience. If you don't play, they will move on toward the next one. There is no investment in you as a piece on the chessboard, where with a bully, there is some sort of relationship there."
Corporate chameleons
Companies of all sizes can be duped, charmed and ultimately destroyed by a psychopath if they give them enough power. Not only are psychos inherently focused on climbing the corporate ladder by any means necessary (the riskier the better), their psychological profile, particularly their aversion to routine, makes them most suited to the executive lifestyle.
"That's the big problem. They are outstanding in their ability to charm other people. I always think of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," says Babiak. "We call them 'corporate chameleons.'
"In a corporate setting, for instance, when you're looking for a leader, you want someone who is competent and loyal. A psychopath can easily convince you they're competent because they are very good liars and they are amazingly loyal because most of their relationships are built one-on-one, so they don't allow you to see the backstabbing, which is done in private. They are able to mask that."
In an effort to help businesses weed out fast-rising psychopaths before they can get their grips on corporate profits and pension funds, Babiak and Hare developed the Business Scan 360, or B-Scan, a personality test based on their research into psychopaths.
The scan is labeled 360 because everyone -- your boss, your peers and your subordinates -- fills it out except you. Their answers to 107 statements are then crunched based on 16 scales of behavior, including bullying, parasitic, unethical, overly dramatic and uncontrolled behavior. The purpose of the test is to "red-flag" behavior patterns that, if left unchecked, could have a negative impact on the organization.
"It doesn't mean you are a psychopath if you come out high on bullying," Babiak cautions. "Now if you come out high on all 16 scales, probably your company should take a second look. More often than not, I suspect they have already noticed you and that's why they're going through this."
Can a psychopath change his or her ways?
"Yes, through some psychotherapy and anger management they can come to the point where they realize that the hurt they do to other people is not a nice thing," says Babiak. "But group therapy tends to make psychopaths better psychopaths because it gives them more behaviors to use to camouflage themselves."
Lest you start feeling unduly squeamish in staff meetings, it's important to note that the bully in the next cube or the drama queen across the hall are not necessarily psychos. But the higher up the ladder you climb, the more you may encounter.
Do psychos actually make it to the top?
"I would have to say yes," says Babiak. "To quote 'Survivor': They can outwit, outplay and outlast everybody."
So when you call the boss crazy, you just might be right.
